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 :-/)."

Re:And *STILL* no QuickBooks Support

[drinkypoo]

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.

Cedega Mashing

[QueePWNzor]

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:And *STILL* no QuickBooks Support

[MBCook]

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?

Re:Cedega Mashing

[spiritraveller]

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:And *STILL* no QuickBooks Support

[Alternate Interior]

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.

I see that it has been tested with AMD-64 systems

[Rick17JJ]

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.

Re:And *STILL* no QuickBooks Support

[teletype]

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'm pretty sure is the OS X/Cocoa QEMU port you mentioned. They have a module called "Virtualizer", which is similar in scope to the QEMU accelerator, but it's still in development.

And, the hardware support within the VM is still not really close to that in the commercial solutions.

So, I wouldn't consider it a viable alternative to VMWare or Parallels just yet. Anyway, Parallels for MacOS costs less than $100US, and is worth every penny, for those folks that need to run Windows apps now and then, but don't want to dual boot every time, and don't want to spend the money for a dedicated Windows machine.

Plus there's just something I find amazing about seeing a 6.5" square Mac Mini run two modern, resource hungry operating systems at once, without breaking a sweat.

Re:Can Linux do everything Windows can?

[mandelbr0t]

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 the APIs available to Windows.

Of course, that's sort of like hitting a moving target. But Microsoft can't move too fast or they alienate their own customers, giving Linux a pretty decent chance of duplicating all but the newest additions to the API. New applications are always designed using the latest API, even when the new API isn't necessary (i.e. the Microsoft API mutates for the sake of mutating to prevent competitors from keeping up). Apple wins the proprietary game here; if Microsoft didn't want other OSes running their binaries, they should have gotten a proprietary hardware deal too.

mandelbr0t

come on quicken!

[DaveJay]

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.

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Performance?

[Dissectional]

Does anyone actually [i]use[/i] this? Its all good and well reading the slew of predictable comments, though I'd actually like to hear from people using this new build on some of the chunkier applications - namely WOW and Steam Powered games (HL2).

I ask as I'm curious about performance. Granted Wine and related projects can 'run' many of these games, thats pretty much the end of it. Performance is usually stunted at best, with the Windows equivalent blowing it out of the water. If anyone here is actually using this product, it would be nice if you'd share your experiences in the performance department. Last I tried Wine, it was nothing more than an impressive proof of concept as far as games were concerned.