The folks over at Codeweavers have released Crossover Office 4.1. Having tried this one myself, I can tell you it seems a pretty major improvement, running several of my Windows apps formerly unusable under Linux.
Crossover Office 4.1 Released
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Is this identical to the one in Xandros 3 Deluxe?
A new tools called winetool which helps to install Windows application to a wine environment is released lately. Make installing IE, MS office easier, hopefully.
http://www.von-thadden.de/Joachim/WineTools/
* DCOM98
* IE6
* Windows Core Fonts
* Windows System Software
* Office & Office Viewer
* Adobe Photoshop 7, Illustrator 9, Acrobat Reader 5.1
* many other programs
http://www.dexy.org/~george/itunes_xover_install/
summary: crossover was easy, itunes was hard.
I sure hope because iTune works a lot better in Xandros than on any distro with cxoffice 4.0
A guess: maybe because there are new applications? (and also because there isn’t a lof of people claiming there were no problem at all… no major problem for them doesn’t mean no problem)
If there is any meaningful difference between 4.0 and 4.1.
Anybody?
4.1.0 CrossOver Office Professional – December 22, 2004
* iTunes:
o Drastically improved responsiveness on 2.6 kernels; eliminated many skipping problems
o Improved menu redrawing
o Eliminated several potential crashes
o Fixed drag and drop
* Other Applications:
o Improved font appearances in some Microsoft Office applications
o Fixed a hang that happened after certain cuts and pastes in Microsoft Office
* Installation:
o Fixed the /etc/auto.master installation bug; now we are much more tolerant of variations in that file
o Disabled DGA, as that was causing the screen to go blank with some video hardware
o Improved error reporting for some menu problems
o Fixed menu problems on several newer Linux distributions
o Fixed shortcut corruption when installing iTunes with Office
o Fixed menu creation of FC3 and in some other settings
* Other CrossOver changes:
o Improved –save-state and –restore-state behavior (important for buildrpm users.)
o Fixed a couple of minor Office Setup bugs
o Fixed a bug with printing on SUSE in certain locales.
o Fixed a serious problem with Windows->Unix associations
Thank you
I’m not a big fan of the concept of Wine/Crossover. If I wanted to run Windows applications, I’d run Windows. I do miss iTunes (believe it or not, the music store), but native applications run so much better than anything running through the Win32 API could.
I guess I’m not running Linux for the geekiness of it. I’m running it because it is free and of good quality. If I were to run Windows applications on it, that would take away those two reasons.
“I guess I’m not running Linux for the geekiness of it. I’m running it because it is free and of good quality. If I were to run Windows applications on it, that would take away those two reasons.”
And if you had to run Windows applications because your job requires it? (Example: MS Office)
Thnx for the testing Mr. Wright!
On a sidenote, can you tell me what theme you’re using? It looks like some sort industrial theme, but (at last) not as bright as the normal industrial one.
As an example, their is clearly a difference between:
http://zenhardwhere.com/images/desktop.png and:
http://zenhardwhere.com/images/currentdesktop.png
if one day adobe would do a linux version of photoshop. right now crossover is the solution for my photoshop need.
ps. amarok is way better than itunes
if u minus the music store :p
With version 4.0, iTunes installed and work perfectly on my 2.6 kernel Gentoo system.
No skipping and responsive.
iTunes can’t be beat for the store and the streaming radio. I have tried Linux native streaming apps, but they just aren’t that polished and don’t work as well for me.
On a sidenote, can you tell me what theme you’re using? It looks like some sort industrial theme, but (at last) not as bright as the normal industrial one.
I think he is using “Human”, the default gnome theme that ships with Ubuntu Linux… I like it better than the normal industrial… it doesn’t hurt my eyes quite as much.
Is it possible to run the OSX version of Itunes under the GNUStep libraries?
Xandros ships with a slightly older pre-release version of 4.1, but the only real differences are in the menu handling of various distributions which doesn’t matter for the Xandros edition anyway. So for all intents and purposes they are the same, despite very slight differences.
iTunes should run the same in both (ie, much better than in 4.1!).
To George Wright: the skipping problems and CPU usage issues you encountered are fixed in 4.1! Have fun …
Do Java applets in IE work with crossover? The last I tried it didn’t work. The only thing that keeps me on windows
are some Java applet based websites I am forced to use.
The web sites were never tested with anything other than IE and they dont work with mozilla or konqueror.
I am using an older version of Crossover with IE 6 SP1 and I have no problems with Java applet and Java Scrpted based websites using IE.
I wish Crossover Office / iTunes supported the iPod.
According to http://www.codeweavers.com/site/products/cxoffice/truth_in_advertis… (about 4.0, written 16 nov 2004)
iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod. It can’t burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it’s usable.
Using Linux AND having to use Windows apps. This is not the way to go. It’s a FIX but I fear that using this FIX is only going to slow down real native Linux application.
Why should Adobe or Apple or anybody else want to port their software to Linux? More work to them, for people who in the end will probably not want to buy it because it’s not FREE (as in beer or as OSS). You know who you are, whining here each time something is not FREE….
So for them, it’s easy : Let Codeweavers do all the work and we will never have to worry about porting to Linux.
BAD…. Real Bad.
Like Apple would have ported iTunes to Linux in the foreseeable future? Doubtful.
Some people need these applications. So which is better, Windows and all closed source applications, or Linux and a few sparse closed source applications? That’s just the way the world is. Do I like it? No. Do we have to accept it? Yes.
So don’t go apocalypse on everybody over Crossover. If you have a problem with it, just use Windows entirely or don’t complain because somebody chooses something you don’t agree with.
Here’s some additional reading, each of which take several viewpoints on your very argument.
Boycot WineX: http://www.timedoctor.org/boycott_winex.php (anti)
Wine Myths: “WINE is bad for Linux”: http://www.winehq.org/site/myths#wine_bad (pro)
KDE developer: ‘How to Kill Open Source on the Desktop’: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9222 (related argument)
One cool advantage of WINE, is that it doesn’t require Windows thus doesn’t require a Windows license.
Okay then, lets not talk about Apple… Plenty more to talk about, Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, Corel, and counting…
I don’t say that Crossover is not good, and i’m not complaining about users of Crossover. All i’m saying is that I fear that it will slow down the «idea» of making native Linux applications.
All in all, it’s not good for Linux and not much better for the users. The sability of Linux while running windows apps….
First of all, the apps this thing supports are very few and quite outdated, for the most part.
Second, that fact that it’s a commercial app suprises me as it isn’t all that impressive to begin with.
Wine has moved so incredibly slow and still has only scratched the surface.
I think Crossover’s product was actually sort of relevant before OpenOffice and a lot of the other newer tools we now have for Linux which can replace their Windows counterparts.
I’m not even sure I’d be all that interested in it even if it were a free and/or open source application.
oh well…maybe they’re actually turning a profit and there *is* some demand out there…who knows?
Linux is great but many people miss Microsoft Office.
This version seems to run Word XP very well indeed.
Word is now probably the best word processor on Linux.
There shoud be a security warning on outlook and IE though.
Allows Linux to run some of the commercial apps that presently give OSX the edge as the best Unix desktop.
Kevin,
Re: “I wish Crossover Office / iTunes supported the iPod.”
I haven’t installed the latest version of Amarok yet but heard that the developers were working on their plug-in library to include iPod integration. It may be in the latest release or in the CVS. There’s also Kpod to help integrate an iPod with Linux software.
http://amarok.kde.org/
http://kpod.sourceforge.net/ipodslave/
The BBC broadcasts in Realaudio (http://player.helixcommunity.org/ ), and the BBC is all the radio anyone needs
Kevin,
Forgot to mention that besides iPod integration using the plug-in with Amarok the audio player also supports CD/DVD burning and streaming radio. The only thing it doesn’t have yet is an online music store to purchase music, though that may change in the near future with it’s popularity over XMMS. Just some things to consider if running iTunes on Wine isn’t what you would like.
Read abt the following
http://www.winehq.org/site/myths#wine_bad
it’s a very good article to explain the need of wine (cxoffice is based on wine)
Hmmmm it’s also kinda paradoxical the disagreement with product like cxoffice. I thought the whole idea of Open Source software such as Linux is to provide CHOICES? You MAY now run Windows apps as well as Linux apps
agree, it about the value in getting your (one) left windows application working. Compare Crossove to Win4Lin and you’ll find that Crossover *has* no value
Well, comparing Win4Lin with Crossover/Wine is realy not the same thing. You need a Windows 95/98/ME licence to run Win4Lin. You don’t need Windows in order to run windows apps in Wine.
Yes you can probably make more applications work under Win4Lin but it’s still limited. So if you want to go that way, you should probably take a look at vmWare, cost more but it’s much better, can run lots of OS with it including WinXP and even Longhorn (experimental support). It’s faster too.
i guess that since wine/crossover/cedega “emulates” win98, then this program can not have a long future anymore?
even microsoft is going to stop supporting these os-es soon…
Is that really true? my experience is that win4lin is about 90% full speed while vmware is about 20%! Why is vmware better? sure you can run more version of windows and other operating systems but for a windows specific application I think win4lin is much much better. It includes a bunch of additional functionality specifically for seamlessly bridging your win4lin windows installation and the linux host also.
Actually, it can emulate any version of Windows you need it to, from Windows 3.1 to Windows XP.