Linux.com

Wine (winehq.org) is pretty much the thing you'd need to run windows based programs, i believe playonlinux is based on wine, not too sure though... there is no standard way of installing things, per se. what distribution did you get? Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse? Most have a manager similar to Add/Remove Programs in Windows. Unlike in Windows, most (if not all) the programs out there is listed in this program and checking the box and hitting apply will automatically download it somewhere and install in your box. That's the easier way of doing things, less easier is typing it by hand with a special command that pretty much does the same thing and downloading files directly from a website, though the problem there is that distros use different 'installers', *.deb, *.rpm etc etc unlike the standard *.exe in windows.