What should I do about Work Computer and Linux

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I just received a Dual-Core Workstation today from work for Web Conferencing based purposes as well as QuickBooks, Office Work, Instant Messenging as well as a Workbench computer to Virus Scan and pull data off of customer computers that need repair. However I can't find a good clone for Quickbooks in Linux. Secondly I don't know if my web camera will work. The computer still has a Windows Partition however I want to use Ubuntu because its my preferred workstation environment.

If I can find out of my web-cam works as well as a good Quickbooks clone for Ubuntu I'll be grateful. Even if I can run Windows Quickbooks in WINE that will be great too.

In my experience, webcams can be a bit of a pain - but eventually just start working, when someone eventually puts the one line into the driver that says the driver can handle it - and the Ubuntu team move on to that version. (I.e. no real coding is involved - just identification that a "new" device functions exactly the same as some other one.)

So far as Quickbooks goes - I did come across http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postbooks - which is open source, cross-platform, but I have no idea if that would help.

web cameras vary considerably and it makes little sense to go by the brand name. instead, plug it in and poll the usb devices.. get its ID number from that and look that up. You cant even count on two identical web cameras having the same hardware. The hardware will match some web camera out there. That doesnt mean there will be a driver, but its a lot easier looking that way.

lsusb is the command to use in terminal. For example, my mouse shows ID 045e:0039

If the webcam supports "USB video device class", then the generic driver should work. That's actually a requirement of the Vista sticker, so all webcams with such stickers should at least work in linux.