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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."

5 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. 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/ -- //
  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  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. 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.