CodeWeavers Releases CrossOver 6 for Mac and Linux

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 :-/)."

And *STILL* no QuickBooks Support

[dopeydad]

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.

Re:And *STILL* no QuickBooks Support

[rainman_bc]

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.

Mixed impressions

[gsasha]

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.

Re:Cedega Mashing

[Compholio]

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:And *STILL* no QuickBooks Support

[dopeydad]

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.

Re:Cedega Mashing

[HiThere]

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.

Re:Cedega Mashing

[Arondylos]

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 look at http://www.codeweavers.com/products/source/ [codeweavers.com]

Don't bitch unless you've tried

[shystershep]

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:And *STILL* no QuickBooks Support

[flyingfsck]

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?

You are wrong

[Per Abrahamsen]

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:Don't bitch unless you've tried

[dopeydad]

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?

Re:Cedega Mashing

[swillden]

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 additions and enhancements. Only the "shell" that helps with installing and configuring apps is closed source.

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.

The difference, and the reason there was anger, is because Codeweavers contributed all Wine improvements they made back to the Wine project, while Transgaming withheld important improvements, keeping them entirely closed. Codeweavers, and other Wine developers, didn't appreciate Transgaming not playing "fair", so they changed the license to one that requires changes to be contributed.

iTunes support

[AusIV]

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.

Re:IE7 on linux

[ChameleonDave]

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.

Re:And *STILL* no QuickBooks Support

[cygtoad]

I run Quickbooks 2000 with Crossover Office with minimal issues.

Re:IE?

[Zonk (troll)]

I 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. I don't do this any more since the Flash 9 beta for Linux works quite well.

Re:Can Linux do everything Windows can?

[Al Dimond]

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 mechanism is totally different. Because process creation is so slow, fork() in Cygwin is very slow. So if you run, say, Apache under Cygwin you'll get awful performance (as I understand it Apache 1.3 performed badly under Windows for this reason and Apache 2 is much better).

2. HDCP. Trusted Computing.

3. Windows software that requires access to hardware that Linux doesn't have drivers for isn't going to work very well. Most hardware is pretty well generalized, but there some practical cases where lack of driver support could get in the way.

Furthermore, AFAIK there's nothing really stopping anyone from writing a WINE-like program for emulating Mac apps; in fact, since OS X is a Unix it would probably be easier. There just isn't much interest; I'd guess that's just because there's not much Mac software that people want to run on other Unixes/Windows/VMS/Plan 9/EROS/etc.