You can run IE through Wine but my experience wasnt the best. The local
MLS is a IE only site that is very heavy in activeX and I couldnt use IE
through Wine on it.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=linux+activex

Your best bet IMO is to run Windows in a VM to get full ActiveX support with
any application. Wine does not cut it and Linux does not have ActiveX.

maybe you can help me out. The only reason I still use Windows is to
download and burn episodes of Car Talk. I have not been able to burn the CDs
from Virtual Box, so I still have one hard drive set up with Win XP and every so
often, I plug in the drive, boot Windows and download and burn several Car Talk
episodes. Do you know how to get iTunes to burn CDs from within Virtual Box?

There are many burning programmes in Ubuntu. Each is specialised in some
way. K3B is the best overall, but that does not mean that others should not
be used for something specific purpose. I burn CDs in Devede from divx, avi
or flv and use K9 copy to shrink DVDs, for example. I have no idea of your
experience level with burning, what Car Talk is, what format they are files
are in, or why K3B did not meet your needs. Perhaps you could tell us more
and we could advise you further.

I just assumed that since you advised running Windows in a VM, you
might know how to make it burn CDs. I have no problem burning from Linux. I use
Brasero, because I had way too many niggling little problems with KDE. Yes, I
know you can run K3B from Gnome but you must install a very large part of KDE to
do so, and that, too, caused problems for me.

The burning problem is that Car Talk (a radio talk show about cars) can only be
burned from iTunes, (damned DRM) which runs only under Windows or Mac. When I am
running Windows under VirtualBox, I cannot get iTunes to recognize the DVD
burner.

First you need to make sure that you can access your drives. The best way to
do this is go to the settings of VirtualBox or whatever VM application that
you are using and make sure that you have allowed for them to be available
to you in the client (Windows). If you check Passthrough ( a good idea) in
Vbox then it will be available in both but not at the same time. If you put
a blank CD in while in Windows then it goes to the Windows side and if you
do it in Ubuntu then it is unavailable in Windows.

Try this with a data disk as a test before you try to burn a CD. Then you
will need a burning application for Windows installed, such as Nero or the
free CDBurnerXP. You can even use K3B since there is KDE for Windows.
http://windows.kde.org/ Then you should be able to burn a CD in Windows.
The big trick is to be able to access it. Passthrough should be able to take
care of that.

If you are using an external usb burner then it is more complicated. To use
an external usb device then you need the PUEL version of VirtualBox and not
the OSE version in the repositories. In this case, you just download it from
VirtualBox.org's website for free. Once it is installed the rest is the same
except that you control usb devices from the menu of VirtualBox or from the
status bar in the bottom right. It will show a usb icon and if you hover
over it then it will say. If you click on it then it will provide a list of
attached usb devices. To hand control over then you just click on that and
it will become checked and once Windows recognises it and makes it available
then you are in business.