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CrossOver Office 5 and Wine 0.9 Released
Jeremy White writes "I am happy to report that we have shipped version
5 of CrossOver Office. The most user visible changes are support for Office 2003 and
'bottles'
which lets you deploy Windows applications more easily than ever.
But under the hood, this release includes all of the major work that went into the 0.9 release of Wine, which
also shipped today and is now officially in Beta."
This release is an important milestone for both teams and goes one step forward in allowing Linux (MacOS users soon) to run any Windows program perfectly.
Finally, CrossOver Office Professional has the ability to create an RPM package out of a bottle. This service allows you to create a bottle on one system, package it up, reinstall it on many additional machines, or simply upload it to the server holding your RPMs thus automating the installation of the Windows applications. This is by far the easiest way to deploy a set of Windows applications on a large network.
.TGZs or .DEBs?
What about
The opposite of progress is congress
I was hoping Outlook 2003 would be among the Office 2003 applications supported, as it's one of the most popular. Oh well. Nice to see WINE advancing as a platform though. Keep up the good work!
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One of the problems that I have found most annoying about Wine is the fact that everything always seemed to require so much tweaking and tuning and adjusting, not to mention manually sorting out DLLs that need to be copied and all of that stuff. The problem I hated the most was the installation! I'm not a genius and I don't have the time and patience I once did for this sort of thing. It's cool as hell when it works though. And such was my experience when I first installed MSIE6 on my FedoraCore4 laptop. I went to a website (follow this link here) that provided a script that performed the whole installation in one step... well almost one step -- I needed to install a cab extraction utility first... and I already had the RPM for Wine installed at the time. But my point was that it was SO simple and direct.
:) And I didn't know it was a "bottle" at the time but now I realize it must be because it created its own "Windows" install in the process.
I don't really care to use MSIE... but I can if I really need to.
I feel like eventually, just about any application will have some sort of bottle available for installation. This is a terrific development and a huge hurdle when it comes to deployment of Linux on the desktop where we still have those "legacy Windows apps" that we can't do without.
For example, Microsoft Office 2003 only works on Windows versions 2000 or later, whereas Microsoft Office 97 runs best in a bottle that emulates Windows 98.
I've had no problem running office 97 on Microsoft's Win2K or XP. Is this a problem with Wine's implementation of those platforms, or a problem with Office I haven't encountered?
As far as I can tell, what they are calling "bottles" is simply storing a "per application" Windows environment. Hopefully this will be implemented in Wine too, because it has tremendous possibilities. Configuration tweaks needed for each application can be bundled with its windows environment, conflicting applications that even a real Windows box couldn't run on the same machine could be made to work... amazing. Instead of hunting for an install CD for a 10 year old application, you could could just copy and paste the virtual Windows environment to another machine or off of a backup CD. No fuss, no missing install keys - it would all be there.
This might someday make Wine not just a way to migrate from Windows to Linux but a way to keep alive old Windows programs that have had all source code and other relevent information lost. Take the old Windows box, copy the binaries over to a Linux wine install, copy over whatever files and settings the application needs when you test it, make a copy of the old Windows hard drive in case you missed something, and you now have not just an old application stuck on a single unmaintainable machine but a "program in a box" scenario. Much worse than having a properly maintained program of course, but a way to keep vital software working much longer than would otherwise be possible. (Yes, I know - disk image mirrors and other proper backups and record storage can also be a big help, but things like that don't always go as planned.)
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Any one know if support for the latest Autocad has been added and if it hasn't what are the difficult areas there. I imagine CAD studios on win32, already being semi-technical with a history of cad applications workign on unix, are a sweet spot for conversion.
Does it have support for Quickbooks? That is my make or break app for dropping Windows all together. I've tried it in the past but menus would get mucked up and you can't run the updater which is required if you are going to download tax tables.
Tried to check out site for info but it's slashdotted.
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I started downloading the new release about 5 minutes before this story left the mysterious future... when it did, my download speed went down to 2.8 KB/s.
I other news: My boss is getting serious about rolling out Linux desktops here. He asked me today for a "prototype" for his desk. Crossover Office is gonna be a big part of our company's desktop transition.
We only have about 150 - 200 desktop users, and our M$ tithe is still about 40 or 50 kilodollars per year. Getting off the upgrade treadmill is going to be sooo cool!
This sig kills fascists.
Unfortunately I am not a coder for Codeweavers or the WINE project (if you notice I didn't spell their website correctly). I am a big fan of codeweavers because I have to use Office at work it is actually mandated. By running CXOffice I am following the rules but I can still run Linux it really pisses off the network admins :-). This is actually a heart felt comment.
If you use Linux as your desktop, it is friggin' annoying and impractical to have to reboot into Windows just to run an app. For instance, I use CrossOver to run Photoshop. Sure, Linux has the Gimp, but I've been using Photoshop for years and I don't want to have to learn a new graphics program. If I had to reboot into Windows everytime I wanted to use Photoshop, I would probably end up using Windows more than Linux :/ In short, CrossOver saves me from going having to run back to Windows. And that's a good thing.
... that Intel-based Macs are a good idea. Now that there's an x86 processor in their boxen, Apple could do for WINE what it did for X11: integrate it well with the OS, and ship it as part of Mac OS X. Double-click an app, and it just runs.
The "bottles" concept makes it even better, and could work well with Mac OS X's existing heuristics for bundling and resource handling.
I did a recent XP update and office 97 preview view started crapping out on me for large presentations, like office was completely hung. Well-hung you might say.
Wine continued to work just fine. So now I have to do my ppt development on linux and ship it to a XP laptop for presentations...
True, but that's the same for Firefox, OpenOffice and Java too. Firefox and OpenOffice look like a GTK / Aqua / XP application but they're not. Java Swing apps only look like a GTK / Aqua / XP application but they're not.
But at the end of the day, the look is the most distinctive cue. The differences in the "feel" of XP and GTK are minimal. In fact, I can't think of a substantial difference between the two. They have similar widgets, similar mousing behaviour, similar keyboard navigation. You might have to ensure the double-click speed was the same, and some of the metrics for scroll bars and such like but nothing major I can think of.
But haven't Apple already done practically the same thing by supporting Java apps as "first class citizens" in Mac OS X? Many of these programs are not particularly Mac-like, but the ability to run them transparently is still considered a selling point.