Crossover Office 2.0 Released

freakyfreak2 writes "Crossover Office 2.0.0 was just released. Finally can get Office XP apps to run. Here's from the announcement. "The changes in this release are as follows: Support was added for Photoshop 7, Access 2000, Word XP, Excel XP, and Powerpoint XP. glibc 2.3 issues were fixed. The setup GUI was dramatically improved. Tablet support for Photoshop was added. File locking and file change notification support were added. Scripts were added so that the technically inclined can have Windows applications open specific file types using Unix applications, for instance, opening PDF fies with the Unix Acrobat Reader. Many other cleanups and bug fixes were made. " Here's the homepage and here's the change log. I'm still waiting on getting Dreamweaver MX to run."

Comments

Re:"Support"?

[delta407]

You can install other things under CrossOver Office fairly easily, and a lot of them actually work, but in this case "support" is thorough testing and hacking the WINE codebase to make sure everything works with whatever the application is.

For instance, Photoshop 7 doesn't run under current versions of WINE, WineX, or CrossOver Office 1.2. I'm happy about this. :-)

Re:"Support"?

[dmaxwell]

Not exactly. In principle, Wine is being used a general tool that can run Windows apps. In practice, there's little things that go wrong and keep say Publisher from running correctly. If Codeweavers has a lot of demand for Publisher to work, then they concentrate on fixes that allow that app to run. Fixes that allow that supported app to run will probably help out some other apps too. Of course, what fixes Publisher may well break something else...hopefully something that isn't too popular.

Basically, it's your second idea. They're claiming to have fixed up Wine so it will run particular apps. They make no claims about other apps that may or may not run.

Re:Photoshop you say?

[jeremy_white]

There is a review here.

can get office working without crossover

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, a stock wine install (03-2003 here) should work fine. In my case I'm using Office 2000 under FreeBSD. Yes, it even runs the installer fine (make sure it doesn't use built-in CAB extractor but the one on the O2k CD), you do NOT need any "native" Windows partition/system binaries/DLLs to get most functionality. Exceptions are OLE stuff for Word saving, which needs native DLLs, and Access/IE is pretty much broke (but Crossover before version 2 didn't officially support either anyway).

Re:Excellent.

[Havokmon]

kinda related to the Wine/Foxpro thing :)

Only vaguely, in as much as it's WINE related.

I strongly disagree. There were two big hurdles to getting VFP working. First was a mouse click bug. Duane Clark (IIRC, can't seem to reach the arcives) fixed that. The second was file locking. File locking is a BIG issue for any program that wants to be multi-user friendly (such as FoxPro or Access). Alexandre Julliard did that work, and is DIRECTLY related to Codeweavers being able to say they support MS Access.

Dreamweaver MX does work under Crossover Office

[leapy]

It may not be fully supported by Codeweavers [yet?], but you can already install and run Dreamweaver MX in earlier versions of Crossover Office/Wine.

You just need to add a simple script that gets over the "required resources" warning by moving the user into the same directory as the executable before running it.

At least, it works for me. I do database hookups, PHP coding, etc.

Because OO is horrible, as is(was?) Xoveroffice

[Mr. Underbridge]

I'd geniunly like to hear from people who want to run OfficeXP on Linux. Why it is necessary?

Well, I won't touch anything with the letters "XP" voluntarily, but if I might substitute Office 2000, then it's simply because, overall, it's better than OO *now*. No, this isn't a flame or a troll...simply the result of struggling and fighting with OO for months before deciding that it gave me more headaches than MS.

To disclose, I'm not a Stallman disciple - I would prefer an Open alternative, but really I'm going to use the best tool for the job. Right now (and yes, I'm obviously talking 1.0) OO isn't it. Open anything reasonably complicated (things embedded, complicated formatting, etc) and OO pukes. The UI is a joke, even compared to MS, and that's hard to do. Opening ASCII datafiles is a pain in the ass. It's way too bloated (easily rivals if not beats MSOffice), and actually too integrated for it's own good. I could go on...

Now, I would rather have Office running on linux than on a separate box (I can't dual boot my linux box, I use it as a server too). I tried xoveroffice 1.0, and found it to be exceptionally buggy. Things would occasionally hang, and worse, sometimes the hanging would necessitate a complete reinstall of xover. Not good! Then I tried vmware, and had some issues there too (it doesn't like slackware's startup scripts, so I had issues getting modules to restart on reboot).

So far, my solution is to avoid Offices of all kinds. I use Matlab for my data analysis, and I do as much in that as possible to avoid excel. I can do a lot in that, but I would like a decent spreadsheet too, and one that doesn't hang at inopportune times.

So, bottom line, 1) OO is a mess, and 2) I haven't found a great way to run MS Office on linux yet. So, at the office, we have a linux box, a mac(OSX), and a windows box. Between them, at least one does any job reasonably.

Re:Because OO is horrible, as is(was?) Xoveroffice

[cerberusss]

Open anything reasonably complicated (things embedded, complicated formatting, etc) and OO pukes.

Have you tried OOo 1.1beta? I use OOo 1.0.2 and when I looked at 1.1beta, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of bugs which have been solved. Just look at the buglist of the 'writer' part, those guys are productive. I'm telling you, it's actually quite usable concerning MS Word in/exports nowadays.