I have so far managed to avoid installing wine - am trying to get away entirely from windows related software. And recent distributions of Linux, in particular Ubuntu, pretty much install and work ok with a default installation. Not like the bad old days of working out the configuration for yourself and constantly failing to get a working system.
But there is always the possibility that the software I would purchase (at a not inconsiderable sum) might not work. I do realise that these software packages will probably not do much more than take some raw ascii based data and format it nicely on a report, so do not expect major incompatabilities. I was just hoping that someone on here would be able to confirm that they had a similar setup and it all worked ok for them.
update:
Just received a reply from Brian Harper at EasyPAT - their software will only run in windows. And I thought they might be the most likely ones to have a linux solution. Looks like I may have to roll my own using Open Office Base.