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CrossOver Office 5 and Wine 0.9 Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the gotta-keep-'em-emulated dept.

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."

9 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. RPM? by baldass_newbie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    What about .TGZs or .DEBs?

    --
    The opposite of progress is congress
    1. Re:RPM? by rovitotv · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In the past you have been able to tar the cxoffice and
      ".cxoffice" directory and move the entire installation to another machine. I am not sure what it means to make an RPM package out of a bottle but if I was installing cxoffice on several different machines I would tarball the cxoffice directories and copy to the other machines. Done.

    2. Re:RPM? by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Yeah, and you know what else kills me: you don't actually get any wine from these "bottles" - that just makes me want to complain and complain about all the other things they don't do.

      But then some kind person smacks me and I realize that instead of complaining I should take note that what's shaping up here is a system for running Windows apps that's better than Windows itself! There is no Windows box that lets you run IE5 and IE6 side by side, and this is actually a rather practical thing to do if you're a developer. Also, I'll make a bet that Wine will do a better and more consistent job of running old Windows binaries than will Vista when it's finally released. This really is going to make an important difference for the future of consumer Linux and OSX.

  2. Hmm by brad-x · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

    --
    // -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ -- //
  3. Bottles are terrific! by erroneus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    I don't really care to use MSIE... but I can if I really need to. :) 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 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.

  4. Office 97/Wni98? by julesh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  5. "bottles" could be a big, BIG deal by starseeker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  6. Autocad Support by mdproctor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. WINE could be the biggest reason... by macserv · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... 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.