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Wine is the name of the opensource project (that started the whole thing).

Then theres a fork of Wine made by Codeweavers called Crossover Office (and originally Crossover Plugin). The Codeweavers product is aimed at (you've already guessed if you don't know) office/productivity software support, like Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver, Windows Media Player and more recendly iTunes. Codeweavers gives their improvements back to the community (I'm not sure Transgaming does).

Of course the product we are talking about here is TransGaming's Cedega, which is yet another fork from the original Wine project (was previously called WineX). They of course support games, directx and proprietary safedisk copy protection schemes.

Both products apparently try to avoid stepping on eachothers toes (so to speak). And both products approach licensing very differently (after forking from Wine proper, Transgaming had a bit of scandel about not giving back, old story).

Personally, I think its pretty funny loading up IE or Word under Linux. Its also pretty nice being able to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver without having to dual boot.

Have you ever seen a company prize its products as "it has some serious warts"? Of course you didn't.

You're making a lame-ass, sleazy attack. If there is one thing that I trust CodeWeavers would NEVER do, then it's false advertising. They even have a page about it here. I'm happy to count myself as their customers.

Crossover 3.1? Instead, they did a much larger upgrade with Framemaker, Quicktime, and some other improvements.

It just seems odd since this [codeweavers.com] was released only a few months ago, and iTunes is still far from flawless under Linux.

This does mean that the next release will probably raise it to silver rating.

> are you required to install the nagware called Quick Time?
most likely. see:

"I am very glad to announce that we have shipped Version 4 of CrossOver Office, with new support for iTunes, Framemaker 7.1, JInitiator, and Quicktime 6.5.2."
http://crossover.codeweavers.com/pipermail/announc e/2004-November/000027.html

note quicktime at the end of the list.

I'm glad someone else said this...when I said it I figured folks would think I was just whining (although we are the Whine guys :-/).

CrossOver Office Office runs just fine on Linux when you HAVE to have that Access database... otherwise, OpenOffice and Ximian Evolution [with optional Exchange connector...] works wonderful. AAMOF, I use OpenOffice on Windoze and Thunderbird to save that $550.00 per 10 computers.

I've gotten Photoshop to run under wine, and Crossover Office lists it as Silver, which means there may be some bugs, but it runs for most purposes.

Actually no...

It also includes Crossover Office which is similar to but more powerful then WINE. I was even able to install visual studio .net on it for a test, had the .net framework going and everything.

Even (just for fun) installed IE 6.0 so I could do "windows updates" for IE and visual studio... it was quite impressive and seamless.

Microsoft Office XP, 2000 and 97

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Microsoft Access

Microsoft Project

Adobe Photoshop

Microsoft Visio

Lotus Notes 5.0 and 6.5.1

Quicken

Various Web Browser Plugins

QuickTime

Shockwave Director

Windows Media Player 6.4 though it probably illustrates the power of the API emulation I can't see the value in MSIE and the windows media player.

I will however admit that Crossover Office / Wine will not run _every_ custom Visual Basic app on the planet... but if you don't have them then there is no technical reason you could not switch to Linux.

... [don't] forget user training, the cost of changing hardware that isn't supported to Linux etc. ... Yes, it is true. Your users will need to adjust to the new desktop, but most products I've seen such as SuSE Linux Desktop make Windows users feel right at home.

I'm not trolling, I like Linux I think it is great for the home and for a hobby but its just not ready for the mainstream. Perhaps in a few years, but not today. I'm not shilling for SuSE or Codeweavers but they do have great products fully capable of blowing Windows off the corporate (and home!) desktop. Btw, you can download a 30 day trial of Crossover Office here. While you're at it, see if it will run your custom VB app too ...

And yes, I would keep a copy to stop from having to dual boot like I do now.

Why don't you just buy a copy of Crossover Office http://www.codeweavers.com

That would seem to solve your personal problem for the most part. I don't know if it would be as useful or convenient for large scale rollouts, but for a single person it might be sufficient.

My last publishing outfit I worked at still has some old 386's running dos 3 for some old wordprocessing apps so they can read in files written ages ago on those packages and then save them out into a friendlier format for recovering the text.

By the way, this product looks rather interesting for running legacy apps on Linux thin clients...

My last publishing outfit I worked at still has some old 386's running dos 3 for some old wordprocessing apps so they can read in files written ages ago on those packages and then save them out into a friendlier format for recovering the text.

By the way, this product looks rather interesting for running legacy apps on Linux thin clients...

Need I say more :) ?

• Aclerex, Transgaming corporate wing
• Codeweavers, CrossOver producer
• Mono project

Questions?

This is funny, but true. I've had similar situations using OpenOffice. I'd receive MS Office documents and after editing with OpenOffice, sometimes a glitch would occur in the MS Word-export. Then colleagues and/or the boss would come up to me saying to stop using OpenOffice and just "run MS Office like everybody else".

In the end, I bought Crossover Office and be done with it.

Furthermore, like it or not, by giving Apple control over the operating system of your machine you make it possible for them to sabotage any serious competition - look at the history of DR-DOS. Within a single vendor market they also have all the other trade and technology advantages that Microsoft used to lock out the competition, and they're not burdened by a monopoly (i.e. they are less likely to be investigated). Again, political naivete is very dangerous here.

And if Linux does become mainstream, do you really think Adobe and Macromedia will release Photoshop and Flash as open source projects?

Of course not, and I don't want either Adobe PhotoShop or Macromedia Flash. I want free SVG editors, good SVG/SMIL support in browsers, and the GIMP and Krita to become as useful as PS in every way - in many ways, they already are, esp. the GIMP. This can only happen through larger adoption.

If your job absolutely requires you to use PhotoShop, you can use CrossOver Office.

An appealing GUI is obviously important, but Mac users sometimes act like it's all that matters. That bothers me. The rampant homosexuality among Mac users is also slightly disturbing (just kidding).

1. Cant help but notice that usability and features aren't listed.

CEOs and CIOs don't care about usability beyond 'can we use it to do our jobs?' The other points the paper does cover answer that question.

1. There's a reason I still use Photoshop. Its features and ease of use make it worth the price.

What tools to use has a personal impact. It doesn't necessarily support the work being performed cross the company. (Photoshop, while not OSS, does run under Linux with Wine -- if not perfectly.)

If I could run it 100% Windows Free I would, but the University I'm due to transfer to next year insists on everyone running Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP, Office2000 or XP, and SPSS. Aside from SPSS I'd be totally fine being Windows Free but so far I have found no way to either run SPSS in Linux (neither Codeweavers nor the regular WINE project can do it at this point) but there are SPSS workalikes that are Linux native. Hopefully by the time I have to deal with stats I'll be able to convince my math prof to let me use either RProject or PSPP instead. I am so ready to ditch Windows once and for all.

You mean about two years ago?

Details on Photoshop 7 support can be found here. However, it has been listed as a "Silver Medal" in terms of support, which in Codeweaver's language means: "This application installs, and runs well enough to be usable. However we find it has enough bugs to prevent it from running flawlessly. "

Details on Photoshop 7 support can be found here. However, it has been listed as a "Silver Medal" in terms of support, which in Codeweaver's language means: "This application installs, and runs well enough to be usable. However we find it has enough bugs to prevent it from running flawlessly. "

A quick look at Codeweavers will reveal that "Most Windows software" DOES NOT RUN on even the commercialware version of WINE. That's why I'm running Win4Lin over FC2.

You can run both Notes 6.5.1 and Photoshop using CrossOver Office.

You mean like Crossover Office?

Considering the market that they are targeting, the single largest expense is not the hardware but the software. A full version of XP Pro costs $300 and a full copy of Office 2003 costs $400. Sure, you can get volume discounts, possibly even upgrades, but considering most OEM's offer low end office PC's for the same price as a full version of 2003, you can see how the hardware isn't the biggest concern if you are aiming at the business value market. An effective API layer for Linux that supports the most common business apps could pull in more money. Also, before anyone brings it up, Crossover Office needs a bit more work and a stronger reputation before it would be considered as a common business solution.

you mean like crossover office? made by

Sorry to seem persistent, but this is what I was referring to. There are actually three support tickets on your public website that ask for UPS Worldship. I used it as an example because I have some experience with it. It is by no means a popular app, and, as you said, you will probably never have fanatical customers banging down your doors asking Codeweavers to support it. An app such as this, however, could be just as important to the future of Linux on the business desktop as something like Office.

Notably absent in your description of Codeweavers' main focus is the small/medium business market. I can't imagine why this is. These are the types of companies that *most* need a product like Crossover to bridge the gap between Windows and Linux. These are also companies that will probably never consider Linux without a product such as Crossover. They are also the types of customers that never post on Linux websites asking for special treatment. They are literally the silent majority of businesses.

What I'm saying is that, as a consultant who has direct access to small businesses and what they want and need, I tend to shake my head much of the time at the decisions that Linux support companies make. I realize that you are "following the money" so to speak and working on the applications that you are commissioned to do. But I also realize that focusing work on proprietary, in-house apps for large companies will never get Linux into the vast majority of businesses. There is often only a small window of opportunity for Linux and Open Source adoption in many of these small businesses. This opportunity comes at moments like these, when major competitors to OSS are busy playing catch-up on security and pricing (and even features) and breaking all compatibility with Open Source in the process.

I also realize that pushing Linux adoption in businesses, small businesses in particular, is very much a "one machine at a time" and "one company at a time" process. Quickbooks is a great example of "one company at a time" because, as you pointed out, there are literally thousands of small businesses in the US alone that cannot or will not switch to Linux because of that one last application, which most often is Quickbooks. To me, UPS Worldship seems to perfectly fit the "one machine at a time" paradigm of Linux adoption. Putting Linux on a standalone, single-purpose PC in a business filled with Windows desktops could give a new perspective to both users and administrators as to the benefits in reliability and manageability of Linux and OSS.

When my clients can't copy and paste in Word or the wrong document prints with multiple documents open, or something like prelink still isn't properly disabled by cxoffice after having been in use by major Linux desktop distributions for almost a year, I sometimes wonder how making iTunes work, regardless of the benefits in speed, is anything but a distraction for a company that got it's start making Office work on Linux.

I remember reading all the hype about iTunes working now in Crossover to the point where I was about to buy it. That's when I noticed this page. Something about "Known to not work" concerns me when I'm buying one product specifically to use another product.

So does it work, or not?

I agree wholeheartedly. I'm doing my best to support Codeweavers, but it's hard sometimes. I get especially frustrated when I see them concentrating an entire release on making iTunes work instead of something like Quickbooks.

Actually, we are almost always working on multiple things at once. Often quite a few of us are working on bugfixes for large, corporate proprietary apps - this is mostly separate to our CrossOver work where we focus on the home/enthusiast Linux users market. The contract work we do for such programs isn't public but the patches go back to WineHQ immediately just the same as work for CrossOver does.

Often these bugfixes are the sort of thing which affect many GUI desktop apps, including things like QuickBooks. So you could say we are working on it in an indirect way.

But I know, I know, you want us to work on QuickBooks specifically, so it runs in CrossOver. Believe me, we'd love to do that too - the only Windows machine in our office is used by the secretary (or as we call her, our Chief Non Geek). She's said she'd be happy to run Linux. So why doesn't she? Right, you guessed it - we use QuickBooks ourselves.

Unfortunately, being a (small) company that isn't exactly rolling in money, we have to focus entirely on what our customers are most willing to pay for. As you can see from our top voted apps list iTunes comes first by a long way with 118 votes, and QuickBooks Pro comes in at number 22 with 16 votes. We can't magically divine what CrossOver users are willing to pay for, so we have to go via these sorts of lists.

I hope that explains our slightly odd focus. Unfortunately Linux on the corporate desktop hasn't taken off yet: given the huge resources Red Hat and Novell are marshalling behind it I'm hoping it has to happen soon, but currently, it hasn't. That means Wine development is driven mostly by personal users.

I noticed in their bug list the other day somebody asked them to support UPS Worldship, which is a *simple* app that would be perfect for running on Linux. Their response was "no" without even considering it

Our bugzilla isn't public so I guess you are talking about the C4 site I linked to above. Our experience shows that there is no such thing as a "simple" app when it comes to Wine - even very straightforward and apparently simple programs can make use of obscure functionality or hit edge-case bugs in Wine that mean they don't work right. By definition if somebody asked us to support it, it doesn't work correctly. We can either choose to spend the time tracking and fixing those bugs, or the bugs that affect high profile, popular apps.

Fortunately we're supported by (and in turn support) the Wine community. We resync with WineHQ regularly (every few weeks usually) so it's definitely possible that a fix for UPS Worldship will make it in from there, or we'll fix it in the course of making other apps work. We term this "collatoral damage", somewhat flippantly - basically it means that as we work on improvements for one program, all the others start working better as well. For example, Office now runs about 50% faster (according to officebench) in the upcoming CrossOver 3.1 relative to 3.0 due entirely to optimizations developed whilst working on iTunes.

OK, I hope I explained how we set our priorities well enough. Thanks for supporting us and the Wine project!

Yeah you're SO right. I use Linux exclusively, but I run Microsoft Office with Crossover Office. So, I am a member of the Windows Office community.

Your logic is truly astounding. Your moderators too.

I can run Photoshop and MS Office on my iBook without any gimmicks or compromises like I would need to run them on a Linux laptop.

I wouldn't call CodeWeavers Wine a gimmick or a compromise. And at this point OS X happens to owe a lot itself to open source.

I think the significance here is that the little guy, an operating system 'cobbled together' by enthusiasts and idealists is starting to approach a state of usefulness only believed to be accomplishable by corporations. And of course, its free and strangely idealistic. Thats why its news.

I won't go into the the many different types of thin client setup you can do with linux, as many others already have;

But if you want to run microsoft office and/or internet explorer on your linux thin clients, I strongly recommend crossover office - it's virtually flawless at running both apps, along with a number of other windows programs. It's a commercial spin off of wine, and it makes installing and running windows software on the clients a lot easier.

- Stealth Dave
satisfied CrossOver customer.

Better screenshot: http://www.codeweavers.com/images/appdb_shots/itun es_20040803.png

The iTunes Music Store should work fine, but we don't currently support iPods or CD-burning.

from http://www.codeweavers.com/site/account/download_b eta/

"Look, let's be honest. We wanted to release the full version of CrossOver in time to announce it for the LinuxWorld Expo. We didn't get it done in time - it still has problems and issues we're working on. However, for marketing reasons, we wanted to announce iTunes support at LinuxWorld. (This isn't as awful as it sounds, we've made the public Wine tree run iTunes, and we wanted to get credit for that before someone else discovered that and publicized it)."

Has anyone discovered how to do that yet and publicised it yet?

+5 insightful?

"he'd purchased from iTMS using iTunes on Linux" is accurate.

"purchased from iTMS using iTunes on Windows on Linux" is not accurate and indicates you don't know what codeweavers (or wine) is.

You don't need Windows to run codeweavers/wine. It isn't like vmware, rather "Wine is an open source software initiative that is systematically re-implementing the Win32 API under Linux. Wine makes it possible for Linux PCs to run Windows application as if natively." The idea is natively code enough of windows under linux that linux becomes a superset of windows.

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Codeweavers sells a compatibility layer for MS Office. Doesn't help you if you don't already have MS Office (legally... ahem), but if you do and just want excel in linux, its worth a shot.

Jeremy White seems to disagree. And if it wasn't for Wine and Codeweavers, I would still be damning OOo for every freaking glitch in their not-so-flawless MS Office in/export filters.

When you live in the corporate world, you can't "slowly migrate away from windows", as you put it. You just have to blend in with the Windows-using lot. And hope they don't spot you, too -- because I have had a number of clueless sysadmins telling me that "Linux breaks the network" when I was the only one who just keeps on working when the zillionth worm hits.

I have been using Crossover Office from http://codeweavers.com/ for all MS-Office work. My personal word processing is done in Latex but if a stupid person gives me an MS Document I am ready with Crossover. When ever I make a presentation I do use Powerpoint. Easy to install and well worth the money.

Also, buy and install Crossover Office right away. This will get you to run Office and other MS stuff flawlessly.

We're going to be seeing Photoshop for Linux any day now.

Crossover Office from CodeWeavers has some support for ActiveX. It's proprietary, but you might still want to look at it. I have Crossover Office, and I can say that I'm satisfied with it, but I've never tried the ActiveX part of it.

*Cough*CrossoverOffice*Cough*...

How about:

Frank's Corner
This website contains all the information you need to get Windows applications and games running on Linux using Wine. Popular applications: AutoCAD R14, Photoshop 7.0, ...

CrossOver Office
Allows you to run many popular office productivity software applications, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Project and Visio, graphics applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, ... Quicken, and Adobe Photoshop, and ... allows Windows Web browser plugins, such as QuickTime and Shockwave, directly on your Linux browser. No Windows Operating System license required; CrossOver is a complete replacement for your Windows OS as far as your applications are concerned. They note that Solidworks 2004 remains untested and they're looking for an advocate.

NeTraverse Win4Lin Run your favorite Windows applications on the Linux operating system in the fastest Windows 95/98/ME environment available for Linux.

I've only had experience with Crossover Office, starting about 3 years ago, when I absolutely had to get MS Office 97 working on a Linux box for a Master's thesis (OO.org 1.x and StarOffice 6.x both messed up on the document's footnotes and/or endnotes back then). I bought Crossover Office at LinuxWorld SF, and it worked fine, though I didn't try it with any other applications.

How about:

Frank's Corner
This website contains all the information you need to get Windows applications and games running on Linux using Wine. Popular applications: AutoCAD R14, Photoshop 7.0, ...

CrossOver Office
Allows you to run many popular office productivity software applications, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Project and Visio, graphics applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, ... Quicken, and Adobe Photoshop, and ... allows Windows Web browser plugins, such as QuickTime and Shockwave, directly on your Linux browser. No Windows Operating System license required; CrossOver is a complete replacement for your Windows OS as far as your applications are concerned. They note that Solidworks 2004 remains untested and they're looking for an advocate.

NeTraverse Win4Lin Run your favorite Windows applications on the Linux operating system in the fastest Windows 95/98/ME environment available for Linux.

I've only had experience with Crossover Office, starting about 3 years ago, when I absolutely had to get MS Office 97 working on a Linux box for a Master's thesis (OO.org 1.x and StarOffice 6.x both messed up on the document's footnotes and/or endnotes back then). I bought Crossover Office at LinuxWorld SF, and it worked fine, though I didn't try it with any other applications.

How about:

Frank's Corner
This website contains all the information you need to get Windows applications and games running on Linux using Wine. Popular applications: AutoCAD R14, Photoshop 7.0, ...

CrossOver Office
Allows you to run many popular office productivity software applications, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Project and Visio, graphics applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, ... Quicken, and Adobe Photoshop, and ... allows Windows Web browser plugins, such as QuickTime and Shockwave, directly on your Linux browser. No Windows Operating System license required; CrossOver is a complete replacement for your Windows OS as far as your applications are concerned. They note that Solidworks 2004 remains untested and they're looking for an advocate.

NeTraverse Win4Lin Run your favorite Windows applications on the Linux operating system in the fastest Windows 95/98/ME environment available for Linux.

I've only had experience with Crossover Office, starting about 3 years ago, when I absolutely had to get MS Office 97 working on a Linux box for a Master's thesis (OO.org 1.x and StarOffice 6.x both messed up on the document's footnotes and/or endnotes back then). I bought Crossover Office at LinuxWorld SF, and it worked fine, though I didn't try it with any other applications.

How about:

Frank's Corner
This website contains all the information you need to get Windows applications and games running on Linux using Wine. Popular applications: AutoCAD R14, Photoshop 7.0, ...

CrossOver Office
Allows you to run many popular office productivity software applications, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Project and Visio, graphics applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, ... Quicken, and Adobe Photoshop, and ... allows Windows Web browser plugins, such as QuickTime and Shockwave, directly on your Linux browser. No Windows Operating System license required; CrossOver is a complete replacement for your Windows OS as far as your applications are concerned. They note that Solidworks 2004 remains untested and they're looking for an advocate.

NeTraverse Win4Lin Run your favorite Windows applications on the Linux operating system in the fastest Windows 95/98/ME environment available for Linux.

I've only had experience with Crossover Office, starting about 3 years ago, when I absolutely had to get MS Office 97 working on a Linux box for a Master's thesis (OO.org 1.x and StarOffice 6.x both messed up on the document's footnotes and/or endnotes back then). I bought Crossover Office at LinuxWorld SF, and it worked fine, though I didn't try it with any other applications.

How about:

Frank's Corner
This website contains all the information you need to get Windows applications and games running on Linux using Wine. Popular applications: AutoCAD R14, Photoshop 7.0, ...

CrossOver Office
Allows you to run many popular office productivity software applications, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Project and Visio, graphics applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, ... Quicken, and Adobe Photoshop, and ... allows Windows Web browser plugins, such as QuickTime and Shockwave, directly on your Linux browser. No Windows Operating System license required; CrossOver is a complete replacement for your Windows OS as far as your applications are concerned. They note that Solidworks 2004 remains untested and they're looking for an advocate.

NeTraverse Win4Lin Run your favorite Windows applications on the Linux operating system in the fastest Windows 95/98/ME environment available for Linux.

I've only had experience with Crossover Office, starting about 3 years ago, when I absolutely had to get MS Office 97 working on a Linux box for a Master's thesis (OO.org 1.x and StarOffice 6.x both messed up on the document's footnotes and/or endnotes back then). I bought Crossover Office at LinuxWorld SF, and it worked fine, though I didn't try it with any other applications.