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Adobe's Dreamweaver is the premier web editing tool on the market today. There are many free alternatives to this expensive software program, but they don't come close to Dreamweaver's capabilities and therefore it's well worth the money, IMHO.

Note: This is for Ubuntu 7.04 for this, so change these commands to match up whatever your distributions uses to accomplish the same thing.

First, install wine if you haven't already. Using Ubuntu to do this, so apt-get is my choice of software installers. Your distro may be different. Consult your system docs for the correct syntax for your software package management tool.

Note: Make sure you have the latest version of Wine for your distro. The current release can be downloaded here: http://www.winehq.org/site/download

sudo apt-get install wine

Your wine user directory and other options aren't set up by default, so issue the winecfg command to set up the environment:

winecfg

which created the necessary .wine directories under your home directory.

Next, copy the entire "C:\Program Files\Adobe" program directory from your Windows partition to the wine program directory "/home/(username)/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/" like so:

(Eg The window's partition is sda2. yours may be different)
cp -R /dev/sda2/Program\ Files/Adobe/* /home/(username)/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Adobe

This is a large directory, so it might take a few minutes to copy over. It also might be easier for Linux newbies to copy/paste this in the GUI.

After that, copy the whole "Adobe" folder from "c:\Documents and settings\All users\Application Data" to "/home/(username)/.wine/drive_c/window/profiles/all users/"

Then, copy the whole "c:\Windows\system32\Macromed" directory to "/home/(username)/.wine/drive_c/window/system32/Macromed/". Notice that the "ia" is left off the end of the word "Macromedia". This is not a typo.

Next, copy the whole "Adobe" folder from "c:\Program Files\Common Files" to "/home/(username)/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/"

Finally, you'll need to copy over the "c:\WINDOWS\WinSxS" directory to your Wine "windows" directory. Wine doesn't have a WinSxS directory, so copy the whole thing over intact. Dreamweaver needs the latest C++ runtime and other assorted files from there to work properly.

After you have copied all of the program files and system files Dreamweaver needs to your Linux partition, you need to export the Dreamweaver registry keys. Boot back into Windows and use regedit to dump this information to a file:

Start --> Run --> "regedit" (Enter)

Export the entire "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Macromedia/" registry key to "C:\dreamweaver.reg" and boot back into Linux.

Now we'll need to convert the registry keys to ASCII format with the recode utility. Let's install that program if it isn't already:

sudo apt-get install recode

Copy over the registry keys to your home directory and convert them to ascii like so:

recode ucs-2..ascii dreamweaver.reg

And now import the keys into wine:

wine regedit dreamweaver.reg

Finished! Now cd over to your Dreamweaver directory and run DWCS3! Hopefully it will work...

cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Adobe/Adobe\ Dreamweaver\ CS3/
wine Dreamweaver.exe

Software developed for windows such as dreamweaver, photoshop, flast etc. requires .dll files to run.

So as per our linux expert's opinion running .dll files on linux will compromise security, the same viruses appears in the windows can be seen in Linux too if .dll's are copied.

So does it makes sense we run Linux with the windows files?

This, Jay, has been a concern for me as well. I am a complete Linux user for 3 years now and I have worked on Flash, DreamWeaver and Photoshop under Wine. So just like you had, I too had similar thoughts, because the primary reason why I "upgraded" myself to Linux was because of the persistent virus issues Windoze was spewing on my computer.

The problem with windoze is that it lets virus programs run on it's own, unlike in Linux where only a user with admin rights can alter anything to the system or do harmful stuff (like altering file systems, deleting files etc etc) Even though Wine is a Windows-like environment it is still working under Linux and hence harmless.

Linked below is an article that helped me clear my doubts when I started using Linux a few years ago. Hope that helps everyone: http://www.linux.com/articles/42031

To add on....... we should also be looking into alternatives for DreamWeaver like Kompozer which is a complete web authoring tool under Linux. Quanta Plus is another one. There are various HTML / PHP editors available as well, Blue Fish being one of the most prominent. The only set-back would be inability to run Flash, which I guess is a much have tool in any web development environment.