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CodeWeavers Releases CrossOver 6 for Mac and Linux

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jan 10, 2007 04:29 PM
from the like-liquid-happy-in-my-veins dept.
jeremy_white writes "I'm happy to announce that we've shipped version 6.0 of CrossOver, for both the Mac and Linux. We have a full changelog available; highlights are are Outlook 2003 and support for games, notably World of Warcraft and Steam based games. I can attest that World of Warcrac...er craft is the most well tested application we have ever supported. It's exciting to watch the Wine project progress — it's a great and growing community of developers (which is a good thing, as we're now all too busy grinding Honor in Alterac Valley to keep up our pace of contributions :-/)."
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[+] Public Betas For CrossOver Mac and Linux 183 comments
Jeremy White writes, "I am happy to announce that we have put up a new version of our public beta of CrossOver Mac as well as an equivalent public beta of CrossOver Linux. For Mac users, this release includes fixes to Internet Explorer, fixes for many cases where programs would crash when run (e.g. Microsoft Office 2000 and similar older applications), fixes for Outlook 2003, and a range of other improvements. For Linux users, the big highlights are support for World of Warcraft and many Steam based games (including Half Life 2 and Counterstrike), as well as support for Outlook 2003. Version 6 also represents a major improvement in the core of Wine since version 5 of CrossOver, so you may be pleasantly surprised as you try running unsupported applications."
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  • well (Score:5, Funny)

    by User 956 (568564) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @04:31PM (#17546578) Homepage
    It's exciting to watch the Wine project progress

    It is, and it's certainly a lot more useful than that other whine project. [petitiononline.com]
  • These people continue to piss me off. They keep coming out with releases that support more and more games, and completely ignore the small business market that's clamoring to run QuickBooks. (Yeah, I know, SQLLedger, etc. are available, but QB is the accounting software used by most accountants, and that's who I need to exchange my data with...) I had high hopes for CodeWeavers 3 years ago, but now I think they're doomed to fail due to bad direction from their management.
    • by rainman_bc (735332) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @04:40PM (#17546744)
      but QB is the accounting software used by most accountants,

      I'd say more accountants work with Peoplesoft, SAP, Great Plains, AccPac than QuickBooks. The world is ripe with accounting software out there, and Quickbooks isn't the only thing, not even close.

      Many accountants yes. most? Now you're just talking out your arse.
    • I don't think I'd ever pledge QB support. That gets you into a position of liability with people's money. You can always use vmware or parallels (depending on what system you're on) to get a full windows environment in which to run quickbooks. Frankly, I wouldn't trust wine for something like that.
      • by curious.corn (167387) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @05:45PM (#17547886)
        No way. All software providers explicitly deny any responsibility for damages deriving from the use of their product. Ever read an EULA? Why would you trust running your business on native windows (at most you could claim a refund for the OS license) and prentend liability from a third party?
        • No way. All software providers explicitly deny any responsibility for damages deriving from the use of their product. Ever read an EULA? Why would you trust running your business on native windows (at most you could claim a refund for the OS license) and prentend liability from a third party?

          Microsoft just tells you that software that works with windows will, well, work with windows. No shit. But if you make a claim that quickbooks will work with wine, that arguably makes you responsible if it doesn't.

    • Why run the windows version when they sell a native mac version [intuit.com]?
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      They probably have more clamor for the games. The fact is that most accountant types probably don't care enough about switching to a Mac that they ask for this. They are either stuck on the PC and happy there, or stated on a Mac and use something else.

      You could use Parallels (especially with the new Coherence thing), although I realize that's quite a bit more expensive.

      PS: Tried any of the free Parallels replacements like QEMU or the Cocoa QEMU port?

      • I don't think there is a parallels substitute. I've tried numerous virtual machines on Windows and Linux, and some of the old PC emulators in the PowerPC days. Coherence mode puts Parallels so far ahead of anything else. I only adopted Parallels over Christmas but it took less than a day to realize how much better Parallels is than any emulator or even bootcamp. I'm sure I've now been labeled a shill or something, but I'm not. I'm just a guy who happens to be a big fan and has seen what else is out there.
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        PS: Tried any of the free Parallels replacements like QEMU or the Cocoa QEMU port?

        Well, it's hardly a Parallels "replacement". It's still considered alpha-quality software, for one thing.

        QEMU by default is a virtual machine emulator. They do have what they call the "QEMU Accelerator", which is available for Linux on x86 and x86_64, which provides proper virtualisation, more akin to what VMWare and Parallels are doing. That is to say, it runs most code on the host processor directly, without emulation, which as you know, slows things down a lot.

        I've been watching the "Q Project" [kju-app.org], which I

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        That's a good point. If you're using Quickbooks, you're going to be spending a lot of time, maybe even the majority of your time, in Quickbooks. And at that point, who cares what the OS is. You're not dealing with it except as a foundation. Not to mention that you'd lose any support from Intuit by running on Linux. The day you need support from them, you're going to be happy you have it.

        (Intuit's support department blows, by the way. I'm not endorsing it. I have gone through hell every time I have had to ca
    • They don't ignore small business, they follow the direction of their customers and the community. Quicken works fine under CrossOver, for example. If people want QuickBooks, then more than 12 people should say something. And more than 4 people should pledge something, and more than zero people should post known issues or bugs.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        I have pledged, and the last time I looked at their community page, QB was in the top 15 or so applications, and has been for a few years.
    • Several version of QuickBooks are listed as 'bronze' [codeweavers.com], meaning they will at least install and run. If you look under 'known issues,' do you know what you see? Nothing.

      If you want to run QuickBooks under Crossover, try it. If it has a problem, then tell them about it.

      now I think they're doomed to fail due to bad direction from their management.

      Somehow I suspect you're just trolling. If you knew anything about Codeweavers, or had even tried the software, you should know that they determine which applications to support based on customer demand. Granted, some apps are probably too difficult to be worth the effort, which would be a judgment call, but by and large their 'direction' comes from the bottom up rather than dictated by a pointy-hair type.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        There's no known issues, because no one runs it.

        I'm not trolling -- I actually paid the $39 a couple of years back when it looked like they were making progress. QB runs, but not well -- lots of little graphic glitches and refresh issues that make me nervous when I'm entering financial data...

        So, I have tried. Can I bitch now?

        • There's no known issues, because no one runs it.

          If no one runs it, how can anyone know that it doesn't run?

          I'm not trolling -- I actually paid the $39 a couple of years back when it looked like they were making progress. QB runs, but not well -- lots of little graphic glitches and refresh issues that make me nervous when I'm entering financial data...

          But if you did run it and experienced these issues, why are there no known issues? Is it possible that maybe you didn't report the issues, and are complainin

    • by flyingfsck (986395) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @05:21PM (#17547496)
      Uhhh, because QB works? I've been using QB on Wine for many years - ever since Corel Linux, which was hellingone way back, what 2000?
    • If QB is critical to your company then either have a box dedicated to it or dual boot with Bootcamp. The impact of an undetected bug screwing up your financials is, IMHO, too great a risk to warrant using a product such as CrossOver.

      Isn't it worth the few hundred bucks for a low end Windows box plus a second internal HD for backup to be sure your data is safe?

      I like my Mac as much as the next guy but sometimes you just got to go with the most straight forward lower risk solution.
    • I ran QB (Pro 2003) under CrossOver for some time, but it's finicky to get it installed there was a certain order to follow and some registry entries to add in manually as I recall. It had a couple of display issues (the buttons at the top of invoices sometimes got partially hidden for example), and sometimes wouldn't start up, you'd have to try several times, but on the whole it worked well-enough to use, and I did so for about 2 years.

      But now I run QB under a VMWare virtual machine which I specifically c
  • by Reed Solomon (897367) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @04:42PM (#17546804) Homepage
    This is all part of microsoft's plan to bring Kernel and Driver development to a halt. Mark my words. This can't be good.
  • Mentioning WoW in the article summary was not the most useful thing ever, considering the native client for OS X (Not Linux, granted... - but if you're mentioning the benefits of Wine on OS X and Linux, pick a piece of software that doesn't have native ports for either platform, duh)
  • Mixed impressions (Score:5, Informative)

    by gsasha (550394) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @04:44PM (#17546832) Homepage
    Just downloaded and installed it. Works OK, will try Office 2003. However, it still has done nothing for international keyboard support :(. Pretty much unusable for me as I use 3 different layouts.
  • Cedega Mashing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QueePWNzor (1044224) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @04:45PM (#17546850) Journal
    I'm almost completely sure I know why he mentioned WoW: Cedega is advertising it. In case nobody knows: WIne used to have a BSD lisence (open source but not viral.) Transgaming took their code, renamed it Winex/Cedega, closed-sourced their developments, and got WoW to work. There is clearly residual anger, but Crossover has been foucusing on office rather than games, so they've been out of the picture...until now. Cedega will now have honest competition, and where the market share goes, nobody knows! Congrats: Wine must finally be getting somewhere! (It's been long enough)
    • Re:Cedega Mashing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by spiritraveller (641174) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @04:55PM (#17547050)
      In case nobody knows: WIne used to have a BSD lisence (open source but not viral.) Transgaming took their code, renamed it Winex/Cedega, closed-sourced their developments

      Last I checked (a while back), WineX was open source. You could install it from CVS, and for a short time, you could install in Gentoo using Portage.

      However, Crossover Office is closed source. It has contributed to the wine project, but it's certainly not covered by the GPL, and the codebase diverged at the point when wine went to the GPL.

      I don't see why there would be anger. They are just two business competing with each other. They both got their start the same way.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        That's not really true - Cedega discloses their source code for some parts (e.g. their direct3D code), but the license used is not at all an Open Source (or Free Software) license. But ignoring that, some essential parts (like the copy protection implementation) are not provided except in binary form. To be fair, their agreement with the copy protection software company probably doesn't allow source disclosure of those parts.

        Crossover Office does have provide the code used in their version of Wine: have a l
      • You are wrong (Score:5, Informative)

        by Per Abrahamsen (1397) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @05:29PM (#17547640) Homepage
        WineX is free software, Cedega is not. It is a derived product covered by a non-free license. Something the WineX license allows

        Wine is not GPL, it is LGPL, a much more liberal license than the GPL. It allows non-free derived products, as long as the Wine part of the derived product is still LGPL, and replaceable by the user. You can download the source of Wine part of CrossOver (it is no longer called CrossOver Office) by clicking on the Source tab at their home page. You can also get the source code for several other none-Wine components of CrossOver there.

        The two businesses did not get their start the same way, CodeWeavers never made proprietary improvements to Wine. TransGaming did, which is why Wine changed license. CodeWeavers and other contributers were tired of the uneven competition between contributers and leeches that the old BSDL license encoruage. The true genius of the copyleft licenses is not high ideals of the FSF they were created to promote, but that they create a level playground for competing companies to cooperate in. "You can get my contributions, only if I can get yours".

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        Last I checked (a while back), WineX was open source. You could install it from CVS, and for a short time, you could install in Gentoo using Portage. However, Crossover Office is closed source. It has contributed to the wine project, but it's certainly not covered by the GPL, and the codebase diverged at the point when wine went to the GPL.

        This is incorrect. The facts are:

        WineX is open source, licensed under a BSD-style license. Cedega is a closed source application based on WineX. There are WineX additions and enhancements in Cedega for which no source is released, such as parts of Transgaming's DirectX support.

        Wine is open source, licensed under the LGPL. Crossover Office is a closed source application based on Wine. Because the LGPL requires it, Crossover Office provides full source to the version of Wine used, including all add

    • Re:Cedega Mashing (Score:5, Informative)

      by Compholio (770966) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @05:00PM (#17547120)
      Congrats: Wine must finally be getting somewhere! (It's been long enough)
      Wine has been getting somewhere for a long time, the reason DirectX was so stagnant for so long was because Transgaming promised to commit their DirectX code. The community is not interested in duplicating work unless it's necessary to make things better, so everyone was really upset when the promised DirectX code disappeared into thin air.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      One significant difference is that Transgaming advertises that Cedega runs Civilization3, and CrossOver doesn't. Transgaming is lying.

      Well, perhaps it does work on some systems, but it sure didn't work on mine, and they gave me less than no help. This is the more annoying as they had it working a year or two ago, and then dropped it.

      CrossOver doesn't advertise running as many of the programs that I'm interested in (not many, mainly games or VERY old), but they don't appear to lie about what they do run.
      • Civ 3 works, but it sucks so much that's almost not playable. Interesting that you see all the map from the begin without the fog-of-war.
  • Yes, but does it run IE7... that's the real question I have... Firefox has been running a little to stable under WINE
    • You're kidding right?
      1). There is a native Firefox port for GNU/Linux.
      2). The IE7 installer validates your Windows install/license before it will install. Good luck installing it!
        • None of those windows are IE7 instances. With IE7 the entire interface has been changed from previous versions.
          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            You're right and wrong. Wine has trouble reproducing the whole IE7 interface on Linux, so what you see there is the IE7 engine within an IE6 window. That means there is no tabbed browsing, but as you can see from the CSS implementation, the important features of IE7 for web developers are there. Give the ies4linux project a couple more months and they will have full IE7 support.
      • For the benefit of having Flash 9 and/or better sound synchronization with videos in Flash (now it's less useful since Adobe released a beta of Flash 9 for linux)
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          used Win32 Firefox under whine for a little. One reason: Flash 9. I kept running into Flash 8+-only sites and also got tired of never having the audio and video synchronized.
          You could just run the Windows version of the Flash plugin under crossover. It's right in the install menu for heavens sakes!

          I think the ability to run plugins under crossover (while using a native browser) has existed since version four of crossover.
  • This makes be wonder if Linux do everything Windows can.
    In other words, are the some things that the WIN32 API needs that Linux can not supply.
    Like some of DirectX perhaps?
    Just wondering.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      x86 Linux can certainly do everything Windows can. Under the hood, they both do the same thing: they boot up a kernel, install system hooks at vital memory locations and provide a mechanism to execute arbitrary binary code. Dynamic runtime linking will pull in binary code that has been provided with the OS (the Win32 API in your example). Ultimately, a Linux machine will be able to exactly run (N.B. not emulate) a Windows binary when binary libraries ported to Linux exactly duplicate the functions in all of
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        x86 Linux can sort-of do everything Windows can. Some caveats:

        1. There might be performance hits because of design differences between the OSes. The simplest example is a performance problem with Cygwin (a Unix compatibility layer for Windows): forking processes on Unix is a fairly lightweight task these days, light enough that it's used to create multithreaded applications. On WinNT there is no fork() and creating processes is very expensive; there's kernel support for multithreaded applications but the
    • No, Linux support for win32 viruses, trojans and spyware is terrible. Kazaa and Bonzi Buddy will never run properly on Linux.
  • Oh great. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Sneakernets (1026296) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @05:04PM (#17547206) Journal
    Cue millions of little stupid youtube videos titled "******** running on a MAC POWERBOOK using Crossover".

    Oh wait. They're already there.
  • by Rick17JJ (744063) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @05:13PM (#17547348)

    I have used CrossOver Linux in the past to run Office 97 and Adobe Photoshop 7 under an earlier version of Red Hat Linux. I later used it to run Office 2000 under Linux instead. It worked pretty well and I was happy with their product. I haven't yet tried using it under the 64-bit version Ubuntu 6.10 Linux on my AMD-64 computer. I see that the Codeweavers web page says that it does work with 6.06/6.10 and that they test under both 32 bit and 64 bit systems, so I plan to give it a try. The idea of possibly running a Windows only Plugin for Firefox is also kind of intriguing.

  • come on quicken! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DaveJay (133437) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @05:54PM (#17548036)
    I've gotten my wife to switch to Firefox, Thunderbird, Picasa (now supported via Wine libs on Linux), OOO, and lots of other stuff -- but she'll never give up the Quicken. Come on, make Quicken run "Gold" (instead of "Silver" or worse) and you'll have a sale faster than you can sneeze.
  • iTunes support (Score:3, Informative)

    by AusIV (950840) on Wednesday January 10 2007, @05:57PM (#17548066)
    For quite some time, I paid attention to CrossOver because I thought they might provide a descent solution to iTunes on Linux (the last piece of Windows software I was able to shed before making the switch). They advertise iTunes support, but they only support up to iTunes 4.9, which is almost completely useless as of 7.0. iTunes 4.9 on Crossover doesn't update iPods, and since 7.0 came out, the Music Store won't authorize music on anything less than 6.0.
  • I don't care about Microsoft Office, Photoshop, etc. They all have Mac versions. I went through the compatibility list to see if I could get a couple of my fave Windows freeware apps like WinAmp and WinSCP. Both said they'd been successfully installed and run under CrossOver Office, but I guess that's just on Linux. On my MacBook Pro, they both exited with errors during the install.

    I wonder, though, if there's some leftover crust from trying DarWine that's interfering with Crossover Office.

    I think
  • ...for both the Mac and Linux.

    Codeweavers will not survive unless they start supporting windows.