Wine will not work on PS3. Wine only works on x86 compatible processors. PS3 is a cell processor which is a sort of PowerPC processor on steriods. If any version of Microsoft Office is going to run on PS3 at some point it would probably have to be the PowerPC Mac version in some sort of Mac on Linux emulator.

Nice idea, but, no. Look at the requirements for CrossOver: an x86 CPU.

But why would anyone bother since OpenOffice.org provides a complete office suite that meets the needs of 99% of users?

If the platform has Firefox you can run this online office application ajax13

http://us.ajax13.com/en/

Small problem with your idea: CrossOver doesn't help you run i386 programs on a PPC chip at all.

For that you need to add an emulator like QEMU (http://qemu.org). QEMU's developement has been partly motivated by the desire to run Windows apps on a PPC Mac/Linux via Wine (http://winehq.com), which is what you're talking about doing.

While the CrossOver product is based on Wine, and is a great product in its own right, it doesn't currently have a PPC-Linux version. And since it is not fully open-source, I don't think anyone has tried to integrate it with QEMU to make a seamless Wine on PPC product yet.

But the easier solution is simply to run OpenOffice.org or KOffice (http://koffice.org) instead. That would be much easier as they already come built-in to FC5.

But your overall point is still valid: yes, if you can run Linux on it, you can use it for business purposes.

But I wouldn't expect to be able to "claim it as a business expense" unless you're willing to go through all the paperwork to keep track of exactly how much time you spend playing games on it.

Yes, I overlooked the CPU issue. Darn, And my point was not about wanting to run Office, just that Win apps could possibly be run, making the PS3 an all rounder box for gaming and whatever comes -- no need for multiple home computers, perhaps.

But is all lost on this challenge? Could not virtualization software do the trick? Just not sure if any is done for Cell. According to IBM Research, Cell does virtualization.

Anyone?

Virtualisation is not useful here - it allows multiple OSes to share physical resources and run on the same processor, each seeing something very close to the real hardware. Since the real hardware is the Power architecture, that's what the virtualised OS sees, so you can't run x86 code except via an emulator. And emulators are slow, and the Cell's PPE isn't designed to be especially fast, so you'd be quite limited in what programs could be used comfortably - DOSBox might work alright, but I wouldn't expect more modern PC games to run. (Well, maybe Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, if someone ports the source code...)