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CrossOver Plugin 1.0 Demo Version
jwnewman writes "CodeWeavers has released the Demo version of CrossOver plugin." I bought the regular version when it first came out, just to try it out. It's pretty impressive - I've only had some problems with it under Konqueror, but that's had more to do with my plugin setup. The demo version is a full version, but with nags in it. It's well worth checking out.
Personally, i feel programs like these are great. However, having to pay for them takes the purpose out of any free operating system. I'd just assume use windows for those programs, rather then pay a company to allow me to use those programs on a different operating system. Although, i understand why these programs have to be paid for. With the current American Economy, noone will develop anything without a monetary incentive. I just hope somewhere there is someone with extra time who will design a program such as this out of the goodness of his/her heart!
AJ
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artlu.net
Maybe they should have some 'home' (non-business) site license for about $25 ;-)
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
My question is whether others out there think this is a good software model? Personally I think it is. They have identified a genuine lack of service which they provide. They provide this service by building on open source technology, namely wine, and then provide a closed for profit products on top of this technology. The revenue generated by these products allow for greater development in the underlying tech (again namely wine) while still providing the desired service, the Windows plugin support.
Aside from the "well these plugins are free on windows, we shouldn't have to pay for a product that lets us use them in Linux" comments. Do people have anything else they'd like to say about the CrossOver plugins or their business model?
So basically, this will be like Winzip: everyone uses it, nobody pays for it. I wonder how long until the crack comes out...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I don't know exactly what you mean by "all popular quicktime plugins" but I just installed it (before the story was posted) and it works great for the trailers at apple.com/trailers.
:)
The demo just has the annoying msgs that appear over the movie, they do go away so you can see the full thing but atleast the msgs are semi-entertaining....
-Torawk
I purchased Crossover several weeks ago and have been completely satisfied. Quicktime works great. Being able to watch the Fellowship of the Ring trailer on Linux is great! Shockwave works well for many sites. (In particular, Shockwave plugins for stuff like 3D has problems.) Codeweaver's tech support mailing list is great, the developers reply quickly and are very helpful.
While I would prefer that Crossover be free software, at least Codeweavers is contributing most of their improvements back to the main Wine project. Pretty much only the Crossover plugin itself is proprietary software. Buying Crossover is a great way to support the development of Wine and get Quicktime support on Linux right now.
I think the crossover plugin is a great idea, but I'm not sure how many people will go for the idea of paying to use plugins on linux that would be free to use under windows (AFAIK, those plugins are all free downloads for win). Kind of an odd turn, using the free Win version instead of paying for the Linux version...
do not read this line twice.
Does it bother you that you have to pay for your computer system (hardware) too???
I cannot imagine a better day to release this than today.
Capitalize on all the frustrated geeks and their inability to find a non-Linux box to view the teaser.
Lemonade always sells better when it's hot outside.
I purchased Crossover when it was released. There were a few initial setup problems but their support is very good. I checked their archives and found an answer to my problem (pugger.so was conflicting with the QuickTime plugin in Netscape). Though I didn't report any problems I received emails from their support staff just to make sure everything was fine.
Performance is, for the most part, indistinguishable from a native Windows version on my 900MhZ Athlon. I understand that there is some initial delay the first time the plugin is started on slower machines. It's been fine for me though.
Netscape *seems* to be a touch more unstable with the plugin installed. There are occasional long delays but I have not confirmed that this is not just some DNS timeout or other Netscape instability (I'm running 4.78... I have not tried installing on 6.1).
"But even better, you can open this type of attachements directly from any mail client."
I am guessing it is only a matter of time before someone writes code that will wreak havoc on the linux community.
I generally don't buy software without having tested it out yet, and just playing with this software for ten minutes is more than enough time to justify the twenty bucks for the thing.
First time I've been truly impressed with some piece of software for Linux in the past nine months or so, and this is to the point where twenty bucks for the full version seems like it's UNDER priced.
Download the installer, run it, press a few buttons inside the config gui, and suddenly you can watch all the movies on quicktime.com.. with no stuttering or slowness.
Damn fine piece of work guys.
Unfortunately, I accidentally downloaded the CrossingOver plugin by mistake, and now all the Web pages I view ask me a lot of vague questions about dead relatives.
Open the QT control panel and go to Plug-in settings (or right-click on a movie).
Then click MIME Settings and unselect anything you don't want QuickTime to take over. (I think more recent QuickTime versions don't intercept PNG by default.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
The three posters above me have completely missed shanek's point, namely that these plugins are available for free on Windows and Mac. He's simply saying that it's too bad that we don't have the same free (beer) access to these plugins that Windows and Mac users have.
:)
While it's true that he's getting his OS for free, what about those who buy Red Hat or Mandrake or whatever? Why should they have to pay for something that Windows and Mac users get free? That's his question really.
I intend to try it, and I'll pay for it myself if it works, though. I use Debian and therefore never have to pay for my OS.
If it counts, i'm another happy user of the CrossOver Plugin. What got me to jump on board and fork over cash for the 1.0 release? Easy. truth in advertising.
They made a point of telling the truth about their product and are making all due effort to support and enhance it. Great company who are doing a needed service for the Community. Not only that, they are a major supporter of the wine project. Got a few bucks? They deserve our support.
As for me, the software has been absolutely flawless. I did have some issues on a Mandrake box but it ended up being Crossover was fighing a battle with Plugger. One minor plugin deletion / restart later it installed like a dream.
Support the community! They deserve it!
If only these would have been released under some opensource license. These plugins could have been implemented in the next version of SuSE/Redhat/Debian/name your dist. and would have really bridged a gap for getting windows users comfortable with using linux on the desktop.
Oh well, it's still cool news.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Save for debian, there's nothing that prevents SuSE/RedHat/Mandrake/etc. from bundling this with their "Official" distributions. I'm betting the guys over at Codeweaver would negotiate some kind of bundling price.
Doug Alcorn
Otherwise, I'd say until Linux is there (and I hate to say it, but it's not, yet) than either dual boot, or think about another machine for your "day to day" stuff, and other for whatever reason...
I've always said, use the best tool to get the job done. If you're compromising here or there, than you're not really doing that.
This sounds like a great product. I don't understand the people here who disparage it because you have to pay for it - there is nothing that says you can't run payware alongside (or on top of, as the case may be) open source and *gasp* GPL'd software. Don't come down on it because it isn't "free" or Free.
Personally, I don't have a real need for this product, so I won't be buying it - I really don't ever see many QT trailers or whatnot to justify it, and all the Shockwave stuff can go out the window as well - give me quality content and information, I say.
I would much rather see the development of an open source video codec on par with Sorensen, and have it become well developed and widely used, but I tend to doubt such will happen, as so much of the tech involved in such an endevor is locked up in patents.
My main concern about such software (like this plugin) is that related to security - whether any exploits could be run against it to gain root access, or something. I tend to doubt this, and if you are running as a user, and you have a good firewall you should be mostly protected - but it is something I always have in the back of my mind...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
An actual installer! It understands the differences in Distros and even puts links/launchers/icons into the menu systems of BOTH KDE and Gnome! Wholy cow!
This is something that developers have needed to do forever. Forget the RPM vs DEB vs Tarball wars and make it easy for the user dammit!
We all gripe about Micro$oft developing software that is just bloated eye candy with crappy (or no) guts. IMHO Linux developers have been too busy neating up the guts to notice that no one uses their program beacuse it takes two friggin days to satisfy all of the needed dependancies just to compile and then annother two to figure out where the damn thing's files should reside.
Oh ya, after the install the product actually works as advertised too.
These guys get my $20!!! Kudos Codeweavers!
"Smile, listen, agree, and then do whatever the fuck you wanted to do anyway." ~Robert Downey Jr.
wget http://movie.url/movie.mov -O movie.mov && wine C:\whatever\quicktime.exe
Of course I'm sure some Dennis Ritchie wannabe is gonna reply to this and tell me how to do it with piping (you know you want to).
I'll bet a lot of Sun employees will be surreptiously buying it so they can effectively communicate with the outside (MSFT) world...
You won't see it on Solaris. Ever (unless maybe while on a LSD type trip Codeweavers ports Wine to Solaras x86.)
Wine is tighed as tightly to x86 as Windows is. But Wine does have features for setting up a wine server type thing for other platforms. I don't know the full details though.
But anything you run under wine is just an X11 client, so export DISPLAY=etc:0 and you're off and running...
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
I suspect Apple can get a high quality, Linux native port of Quicktime done relatively quickly and inexpensively. However, what value does it have for Apple? Will it increase sales of other Apple software? Not likely. Will they sell alot of copies of the Pro version for Linux? Not likely. Will the port strategically help Apple in any real way? Nope. In Apple's mind, Quicktime for Linux has no value, so investing any time or effort into it is a bad idea.
Quicktime on Windows is a different story. It probably doesn't make Apple much money. I wouldn't be surprised if it cost more to develop than they make in Quicktime Pro sales. However, if Quicktime stopped being supported on Windows the world would move to another format (probably Windows Media) practically instantly. The market share of Windows is too important to miss. Apple needs Quicktime on Windows as part of their holding action. Linux doesn't have that leverage, so we're going to remain second class citizens for some time.
Installed flawlessly, nice configurator, it looks nice and best of all IT WORKS. I was skeptical at first but then I got to see the Star Wars trailer. I'm going to shell out the $20 for it. Try it out you might be as surprised as I was.
On a side note they don't disable the demo after 30 days. It looks like its more of an on your honor system. But it does put little messages to buy the software at the beginning of the movies. (At least in quicktime).
Again though, this looks like it was well worth it and the $20 goes to Wine.
The Anti-Blog
On balance, I'd say: don't use it unless you really have a very compelling need. View MS Office documents in StarOffice or AbiWord and submit bug reports for any problems you find; that's how those programs get better. As for Quicktime, complain to the web site using it and ask them to use an open format instead (in fact, do that whether or not you actually have a Quicktime viewer).
List of Fixes in 1.0.1
They have an interesting coming soon product. I'm referring to the second item, basically a simple client workstation built just to run Windows apps, but without purchasing Windows. I don't think this'll take off for internet appliances (might as well make a special Linux distro for that with custom apps), but it may open some eyes to other possiblities. Maybe distros built specifically to replace MS licenses. Maybe transitional product lines for moving MS users to free-as-in-speech platforms. I think making that transitional product is a great idea, and of course charging for it is logical and potentially very profitable in the long run.
Having transitional products is the best way to show corporations how much money they can save from MS licenses, while getting them onto free software. This is very and sounds like a great business model (at least for this specific product).
Developers: We can use your help.
I installed the demo on my Linux box (Mandrake 7.2 using IceWM as my window manager). Crossover added itself to my IceWM menu file, except instead of simply *adding* itself to my menu file, it copied the default menu file *over* my menu file and then added itself to *that*. Basically, all of my custom changes to the default menu file were lost when I installed Crossover.
Aside from that, it works great (although Apple seems to have found a way to make the Quicktime 5 plugin never cache a downloaded movie on your local machine, which is annoying as fuck -- I want to view it whenever I want, without having to re-download it every time. Can you say "waste of bandwidth"?). I don't know if I'd use the Crossover plugin enough to justify paying for it, but we'll see.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Yes, it's legal. They went to Apple and asked because the license said that the software could only be installed on the OS that it was written for. Apple actually changed the license so that they could produce this product?
Why is Apple not just creating a Linux client is beyond me.
I got news for you: lack of Quicktime is very nearly last on the list of reasons why Windows users aren't switching to a Linux desktop.
That a lot of Linux people think it's near the top is, ironically, one of the things that is holding it back.
Here's some more news: no one will abandon Windows for Linux because of any Windows features Linux mimics, emulates or fudges. No matter how well Linux imitates it, Windows always does a better job of being Windows. Windows features on Linux are one of the few desparate strategies that might keep Linux from fading into useful BSD-like obscurity.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Install was mostly painless, but I did have to poke around a bit and 'activate' a couple of the plugins. Joe Average User might have some problems, but we're definitely getting closer.
Those "friendly reminders" are anything but. Damned annoying, IMO. Also, my fonts in Flash animations looked suspiciously like the default font in Netscape (I use Moz0.9.5) after I installed it. I uninstalled it after a few short minutes, mostly because of the annoying reminders, and the Flash fonts reverted back to their previous appearance.
While I do appreciate the usefulness of this product, Flash and Real already work for me, and that added to the annoying font issue make it not worth my $19.95 yet.
YMMV...........
Isn't there a native shockwave plugin for linux?
The "about" page on the Wine Web site says Wine "works on most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris."
Well, that depends on the part of Wine you're talking about. As the "about" page says:
The program loader part - which is what CrossOver uses - is tied to x86 (I guess if somebody were really ambitious they could try to make it run MIPS, PowerPC, or Alpha Windows NT binaries - and at some point somebody might do that for IA-64 - but there are a lot fewer non-x86 Windows binaries than x86 Windows binaries, so there's probably not going to be much effort devoted to that soon). So you probably aren't going to see CrossOver for Solaris/SPARC; Solaris/x86 might be possible, but there's probably not much effort going to be devoted to that, either.
(Well, I suppose somebody could try gluing an x86 interpreter, or x86-binary-to-native-binary translator, to Wine, to make a version to run x86 binaries on non-x86 UNIXes, along the lines of Sun's WABI. I don't know whether anybody's thinking about that, however.)
The Winelib library, however, does, I think, work on non-x86 platforms, letting somebody who has source to a Windows application - that "somebody" might be the developer; the idea is, I think, that this can be used for closed-source applications, which I suspect is why WINE isn't GPLed or LGPLed - port it to UNIX.
One of the services that Codeweavers offers is assistance in porting Windows applications to Linux; they speak of "native versions", so this may involve using Winelib.
I think the problem with running Wine on anything other than x86 is the need to interpret x86 machine code. Even if you got it to work, it would be slow.
You are right that compiling source code on Solaris and other platforms under Wine could work. But even there I expect Windows source code to have a lot of x86 assumptions. There are also problems with the fact that a lot of stuff requires a working Windows DLL, which would have to be interpreted anyway.
One problem with porting QuickTime to Linux is that QuickTime needs a complete Window manager API because it has its own internal API for managing windows, menus, dialogs, etc. These routines call through to the underlying API which must have a large common subset of functionality to support the x-platform nature of QuickTime. So while QuickTime for KDE or QuickTime for Gnome are reasonable concepts, QuickTime for Linux is not. Of course, there is already QuickTime for Java which uses the Java API and runs on Linux.
The other thing is that Apple needs to do a LOT of work to bring the Cocoa API up to rough parity with the Windows, Java and Carbon versions. They won't make any commitments as to when, if ever, that work will be underway. If they took on Linux before Cocoa their developers would go postal.
PythonTheater plays wmv, http://xtheater.sourceforge.net/, as well as mpg, asf, and avi.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This entry in the Wine FAQ says otherwise:
I seem to remember reading about a license change to an X-style license at one point.
Yes, hence my references to interpreters and binary-to-binary translators.
Well, with a good binary-to-binary translator, it might not be. Anybody know how well FX!32 did running NT/x86 binaries on NT/Alpha?
Some might, some might not. (Then again, there's probably an unfortunate amount of code written for Linux with x86 assumptions or, at least, "the world is little-endian" assumptions; I've certainly seen code contributed to Ethereal, for example, which worked only on little-endian machines....)
Is anyone able to stream videos in Netscape Communicator v4.78? about:plugins show MOV and QT is off. I checked my settings and they are checked. How about you guys?
Thank you in advance.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).