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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."
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/ --
I would rather see important apps ported to Linux. If there is so much demand for Wine/Crossover, then surely there is demand for the apps natively on linux? Ask your vendors where they are.
Actually I can understand not wanting to bear the cost of two lines of developement. I wouldnt mind if they simply came out and officially said they would support users trying to run under wine.
Using GTK for Wine would be totally opposite to it's goals. While it might be nice for some things, it means that it's no longer possible to have exact Windows compatibility -- you'll be putting more and more hacks in to make things work, rather than actually reimplementing the Win32 API, like they have thus far. Overall, it might make 30% of applications look nicer, but it might break the other 70%, what do you think is more important?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
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.
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.
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?
So, here's a direct link to the demo torrent.
Enjoy!
The reason there are official "beta" and "pre-pre-pre-Alpha" releases is because it informs the community of the intended audience. The "pre-pre-pre-Alpha" phase is for interested developers. The "beta" phase indicates it's not ready for your production data, but if you are an interested user, you can help the project by searching for bugs.
Also, these milestones give the community a chance to judge how long it will be before the "official" 1.0 release. In the case of Wine, this is a decade in the making, and is a very, very, VERY big deal. So, it might only be a year before we see an official 1.0 version of Wine.
Commercial companies have learned that internal Beta releases do not find all the bugs, and so they have emulated the free software community by releasing early, releasing often. I feel this has helped products like MS-Windows become stronger products. They don't get all the benefits of open source, but they do get some.
In any case, if you are not interested in anything but the 1.0 release, that's fine; meanwhile, those of us who like the Wine project, and like to test and debug important projects know it's a fine time to jump in and help. Our participation will hopefully make your 1.0 experience a pleasant one.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
... 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.
> In the past you have been able to tar the cxoffice and ".cxoffice" directory
.cxoffice directory from one machine to the other you were losing the menus and file associations. Then you had to go into CrossOver Setup and manually recreate each of them.
> and move the entire installation to another machine.
[...]
This still works and much better than ever before.
You probably remember that when you simply tarred and restored the
Now all you have to do is run the following command and all the KDE / Gnome menus, file associations and browser plugins will be recreated:
~/cxoffice/bin/cxbottle --bottle win98 --install
The point of turning a bottle into an RPM is that there are tools that will automatically 'push' RPM packages to a bunch of machines. Big companies usually use such tools. So now all they have to do is generate an RPM, upload it to their server, and what you did above for one machine will happen automatically for their 200, 400 or more desktop computers.
Well, the problem with Win32 is that much of it is unknown territory :) It's difficult to implement something that is completely undocumented while being quite as huge as Win32.
.). In order to keep it working for that stuff, it makes sense to stop generating new implementations, and work out as many of the bugs as possible. Thus, nothing to revolutionary will be accepted into the tree between now (beta) and 1.0 (release). Patches between now and then will focus on making sure existing functionality works properly. Once 1.0 happens, new features can be implemented on an as-needed basis.
.'
Also, certain things are unimplementable, but also don't work in modern Windows anyways. VxDs, for example, often break in XP. Multi-user support doesn't make much sense, given that each Wine 'install' (/home//.wine/) is single user.
The amount of implemented 'stuff', however, is quite telling, especially considering that the latest and greatest Office suite (2003) runs on Wine now.
Also, notice the update date on the status page? August 16, 2005 . . . . I know that the Direct3D stuff has come a LONG way; the status page lists d3d8 as 10% done, while in reality, d3d9 is almost there. Especially true with the gaming 'stuff', but also for general cases, support is app driven. 'X' app breaks because 'Y' function isn't implemented yet. So someone picks it up. Combined with a few general architechtural changes (like the Installshield stuff), you get 90% app support. Remaining work is completed on an as-needed basis. The flip-side of this process is that you get up to speed on new stuff coming down the MS pipeline.
To your second question. "Beta". What does it mean?
Beta means 'feature freeze'. Wine, as a Win32 API implementation for Unix, is useful now. You can run IE, Office 2003, Google Earth, Picasa, Photoshop, and a boatload of other popular apps. (Quickbooks, etc. .
So far, in 'alpha', the Wine developers were not afraid to break major parts of the API. Often, a snapshot would be almost unusable, or break dozens of applications. This is necessary when certain sections of the code had to be ripped out and reimplemented.
Now that Wine is getting more and more functional/useful, this development methdology will have to change. With release, it'll be safe for Linux distributions to list support for certain Windows applications using the free implementation of Wine. That'll be quite a coup if you think about it. 'Includes Wine 1.0, support for Office 2003, Internet Explorer 6, Adobe Photoshop CS, etc, etc. .
I imagine the Wine 1.0 tree will continue to receive bug/security updates along side newer versions.
The end vision of the Wine project is not emulation layer. The end vision of the Wine project is a fully functional UNIX app API, alongside things like QT/KDE, or GTK2/Gnome. Moving out of the haphazard alpha state of the project is a necessary step in its maturity.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell