Jeremy White And Mad Penguin On CrossOver Office 3

SilentBob4 writes "Today, a review of CrossOver Office 3 (written by Preston St. Pierre) as well as an interview with the founder of CodeWeavers Inc., Jeremy White (written by Adam Doxtater) have been published for mass consumption. It looks like CrossOver Office/Wine has come a long way since the dark ages of Linux science. Congratulations to the developers on both teams on a job well done. The interview with Jeremy is better than any I have seen recently."

Comments

do we still need it?

[xlyz]

I feel less and less the need to run Windows software

Re:do we still need it?

[Rignes]

I think there is a nitch for Crossover. While many Linux home users don't feel the need to run Windows applicaitons anymore, there are plenty of businesses that feel they need to run MS Office (some even have it as a requirement to do business with others). I think Crossover is a great way to offer a stepping stone for businesses. As in, they can ditch the expensive Windows Operating systems and change to Linux while their users can still use the applications they already know.

In my mind it gives a middle ground step between being 100% Microsoft and changing to 100% Linux/OSS. As in, individual users are very dynamic and can change all their stuff at once if they so choose. Must businesses take things slower and think about making such drastic changes.

Crossover just gives them a stepping stone that breaks a big change into smaller, easier to swallow, chunks. Also, it breaks up the learning curve, it gives users a chance to learn Linux first, then to learn an Office alternative if they so choose.

Brian

Re:do we still need it?

[yog]

Well, each person's needs are different. Since you don't need it, you can save your $60. But I still have a lot of uses for Windows software, and Crossover has saved me from having to go boot up my Windows laptop, to wit:

- IE 6.0 -- some sites simply won't work with Mozilla. Rather than mess around, I can easily run IE now right on my Linux desktop, view the offending page, and later whip off a scolding message to their webmaster.

- MS Word 2000 -- sometimes I have to save a document in Word format, and I need a way to confirm that Open Office did the right thing. Word 97 Viewer is useful but I feel safer when I can easily edit a document using the native tool.

- Photoshop 6.0 -- works terrifically! I am an enthusiastic GIMP user, but it's nice to have all the best tools for a job, not just some of them.

- Finale 2001 -- Finally, I can view and print my music from Linux! Works like a charm. Think I'll d/l Finale 2004 and see if that works....

- MS Excel 2000 -- for occasional use.

- MS Powerpoint

- Efax Viewer -- I wish they'd send faxes in some more obvious format like jpeg but anyway this works great with crossover.

- H&R Taxcut 2002 - the only thing wrong with it was that it would crash when I clicked "Help". Now if Turbotax worked, I'd be happy as a clam.

- Palm apps that come packaged as .EXE or use a SETUP.EXE, like f'r'instance Adobe Acrobat for Palm. I can safely execute these programs, let them "install" to my fake_windows directory, then grab the Palm .prc files and manually install them.

- Little Windows freeware or shareware utilities that do stupid little things and expect you to send $20, like finding all the images inside a DLL or EXE. I can d/l these, try them out, etc., from the convenience of my Linux desktop. Often they have strange glitches but the general functionality is usually intact.

I wish Dreamweaver MX 2004 worked in wine. Maybe Crossover 3.1???

Re:Wine

[j0hndoe]

Actually because Wine is LGPL, Codeweavers is forbidden to make proprietary changes to the main codebase (and they supported this change, it used to be a more liberal license). All the really do is package it up, make nice installers, provide support, same as any other "good" company based on FOSS software.

MS Office has been runnable with Wine for years, so your argument kinda goes down the drain.

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[arvindn]

No it won't. This has repeatedly been gone over before. The difference compared to OS/2 is the community. Do you think all of us linux zealots are going to stop writing apps if wine becomes good enough? :-)

There might be a slight tendency for commercial software vendors to not bother porting their apps to linux because of wine, but that's becoming harder and harder as linux edges closer to critical mass. And with heavyweights like IBM and Novell behind linux, I wouldn't be too worried.

Re:Hmmm.. Makes me think of OS/2

[e6003]

I disagree. There are far greater pressures for switching platforms (such as the MS licensing fees hike and the pressure to upgrade to give MS another cash injection - not to mention Sasser and Blaster) now than there were 10 years ago when OS/2 was at the peak of its fitness. Like it or not, MS Office at least has become the standard and if you want to persuade the corporate users to switch, you need to support it. Also recall what Disney said about Photoshop - it was the last thing that kept them switching their animation studio over to 100% Linux desktops, so they paid Codeweavers $15k to support it.

There was no real incentive to switch to OS/2 from Windows as the state of the market was then. 10 years later there is, and I don't think the comparision is valid any more.

Too little, too late.

[panamahank]

In looking at the list of Gold apps, and those are the only ones that matter since partial functionality sucks, I don't see a single app that I need that isn't already done well enough by Linux. It would be nice if they had fully functional Access compatibility, since one of my customers has subscribed to a service that uses an Access database, and records can only be downloaded in Access format. It really sucks to have to have a dual-boot computer just to convert those records.

Crossover is a serious application.

[aussersterne]

I am a former "wine hater" who was never able to get it to do anything useful. It turns out that a large part of making Windows applications work properly in wine is managing the registry and which libraries will be native/non-native for each application.

This is Crossover's value-add to wine: it takes care of all of the wine details for you, so that you don't have to be a wine coder with all of the detailed Windows .DLL and registry knowledge that implies, just to make Windows applications work.

I have to use MS Office XP for my work in print media and publishing. I also need Photoshop from time to time, though with GIMP 2.0 this need is greatly reduced.

MS Office XP, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and Windows Media Player all work perfectly under Crossover with Wine. I will never have to use Win4Lin or VMWare again or cope with a full Windows desktop again!

Now that I have seen wine actually work, and work brilliantly, I believe in it to a much greater degree.

Re:Crossover is a serious application.

[aussersterne]

I'm working on a masters' thesis right now and have just used Word XP in Red Hat 9 for nearly seven hours straight, with styles, tables, graphics, footnotes, etc.

Two days ago, I spent nearly 12 hours straight in Word XP working on a complex document, with revision marks, for use in a publication.

1) I don't find it to be slower than in its native environment (PIII-900, 512MB RAM)
2) It has not crashed on me since I installed it several months ago (neither has Photoshop 6)

I'm sorry you haven't had the same experience!