will Pastel accounting work on Ubuntu os

It appears that no-one has really tried it.

There are usually native linux applications that tend to work much better and 'gnucash' is probably the most advanced (certainly seems to be the most popular) of the general accounting packages available. I've had a quick look at what pastel does and it seems that gnucash might be a suitable alternative and that exporting the information from pastel "shouldn't" be too tough (how many times have i heard that before tho).

I'm just about to contact pastel because they seem to take pride in being adaptable and they might be able to quickly port over to the fastest (and only) growing market sector in the IT today, linux. It usually takes a few people contacting them before they start to really consider it tho so drop them an email.

Many Windows applications work quite easily in Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator as it uses a much more sophisticated approach to get much faster speeds and higher level of integration than a traditional emulator could achieve) and the Wine project has a database of how different people got different programs working in cases where it wasn't easy and straight-forwards
http://appdb.winehq.org/
I looked up pastel and got a result for Sage Line 50 (doesn't this always happen when looking up accounting software?) but the last person to try Pastel was very inexperienced and didn't seem to try many of the standard tricks in Wine (such as trying the application "Wine tricks") also they last tried it about a year ago ad there have been many developments in Wine core functionality since then
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=14489
the sage page, but gnucash is usually far better than sage line 50
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=1453&iTestingId=6781

Usually when moving over to linux we tend to set up dual-boot machines so that we can start up the machine into Windows for tasks we haven't quite got used to in linux yet. This is not an option that a Windows install would give but linux can easily fit onto a drive alongside Windows and the two OS's can then help each other out
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot
it's said that most long term linux users still keep a working Windows because odd games and things sometimes work better at first and it helps when people ask us for technical assistance with Windows problems to be able to go back into a Windows and have a quick look around. So don't be hasty to wipe Windows and don't assume that you have to completely abandon Windows familiarity to get all the advantages in efficiency that linux brings ;)

Also many people install a virtual machine onto their linux and then install Windows into that so that they can use Windows programs easily without restarting the machine. This does sometimes work quite a bit slower than Wine and follows a traditional emulator type approach but it has the advantage of being quite easy. Since the Windows install is really just a fresh install of Windows onto the same machine you should be able to use the same product key rather than having to purchase a new Windows licence. The most popular vmware package is "VirtualBox" as it works in many different linux distros, not just Ubuntu. However, the commercial program VMware is also used quite often so presumably it has advantages over VirtualBox because people have to pay for VMware but VirtualBox is free.

When i worked in accountancy many of the practice's clients used Excel Spreadsheets and we found them good for drawing up working papers, trial balances and year-end accounts. The OpenOffice program "Calc" seems to be an improvement on excel because of the safer format ut it can easily save stuff as ".xls" or other formats for Windows users to be able to read. Calc can easily read excel's files.

Sorry this is so long and not quite the answer you were looking for as it really boils down to "don't know, haven't tried". I hope something here was useful though!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Ok, further to my last post, here's the email address for Pastel
<email address hidden>

and their other contact details from their website
http://www.pastel.co.uk/contact_us/contact.htm

Here's some information about GnuCash and the Wiki page which seems to start describing accountancy from first principles :( (sighs)
http://www.gnucash.org/
http://www.gnucash.org/features.phtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCash

And here's some information about vmware, including VMware itself
http://www.virtualbox.org/
http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?hl=en&q=VMware&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=kAo-SrjbLsSLjAf2j-36Dw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=5&ct=title#

Note though that in linux there tends to be a "package manager" that does the job of collecting safe software and keeping it updated so that you don't have to scour the internet trying to find stuff. In ubuntu we have 2 systems that share the same command-line tool and databases, i prefer the "Synaptic Package Manager" but many prefer "Add/remove applications" which does a lot more than the Windows equivalent, in that its useful for finding and installing programs. No more wondering about whether you are getting a legitimate product or something virus infested, not that linux suffers from viruses anyway but i'm sure you understand the point :)

Good luck and regards again from
Tom :)