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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

CrossOver Office 7 Linux and Macintosh Released

The following is the release announcement from Jeremy White of CodeWeavers (CrossOver):
Hi Folks,

I am pleased to announce that we have shipped CrossOver 7 for both
Macintosh and Linux. New in Version 7 is support for
Microsoft Office 2007, dramatically improved support for Outlook 2003
and Internet Explorer 6, and a broad range of improvements that should
bring improvements to all Windows applications.

For our Linux customers, it also brings expanded support for most
Adobe programs, with Photoshop CS and CS2 working particularly well.

For our Macintosh customers, this release also brings a change in our
product mix. We are now providing "CrossOver Mac Standard" and
"CrossOver Mac Professional". The new Standard product will mirror
the Linux Standard product, in that it will be a lower priced product
with more basic support and no multiple user support. The new
CrossOver Mac Professional product replaces the existing CrossOver Mac
product. It continues to have our best support, support for multiple users,
and, CrossOver Mac Pro continues to come with a complimentary copy of CrossOver Games.

If you have purchased CrossOver Mac in the past, you have been automatically
upgraded to a CrossOver Mac Pro license.

Finally, another major benefit of 7.0 is that it includes many of the
elements of Wine 1.0, which was also released today. This is a major
milestone for us, and for the Wine project. Our many years of work,
and your many years of supporting our work, have enabled us to
help bring Wine to this milestone. I am very proud to have been
part of this, and very grateful for all the support of
our customers, advocates, and fellow Wine developers.

If you are an existing CrossOver customer with an active support entitlement,
you can visit our web site to download this latest version:
www.codeweavers.com
You will need to log in with the email and password that you used when
purchasing CrossOver. Please write to info@codeweavers.com if you need
help with this process.

Thanks again for all your support, and I hope that you enjoy CrossOver 7!

Cheers,

Jeremy White
CEO
CodeWeavers

---
Version 7.0 Changelog:

New application support:
Office 2007 (Including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook)
Photoshop CS and CS2
Added support for the "Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office system"
so that Office 2003 can open Office 2007 documents

Bug fixes:
Greatly improved online banking integration in Quicken 2007 and 2008
Greatly improved Outlook behavior, particularly with Exchange servers
Fixed service pack support for several versions of Office
Improved IE support in win2000 and winxp bottles (though win98 is
still better)
Improved support for modern Linux distributions (especially Ubuntu)
Fixed a seriously horrible interaction with the Logitech Control Center
documents from Office 2007

This version also includes countless Wine fixes and synchronizes with Wine 1.0.
Many small bugs should be fixed, and unsupported application behavior should be greatly
improved.


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CrossOver Office Mac Version 7.0.0 Review

INTRODUCTION:

In our last installment we reviewed CrossOver Games for the Mac. This week we will take a look at the current version of CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is one of the successor products to the CrossOver Office suite.

CrossOver which was once original for Linux, now allows you to run Windows applications such as Microsoft Office, Intuit Quicken and Quickbooks on your Mac.

As stated in part one, CrossOver is based on the Wine project and as such shares some of its technical limitations and abilities. Wine is a compatibility layer for non-windows systems allowing them to run Windows applications.

to a limited degree. Due to the highly complex nature of the software, third party vendors such as CodeWeavers package Wine to create a product for the end user. In part three we will go in to more detail about the internals of Wine and why it imposes limitations on the products built around it but for now, lets take a look at CrossOver 7 for Mac and the applications that it supports.

CodeWeavers has just released CrossOver 7 Mac which now provides support for Office 2007 based applications. As this is new to CrossOver not all 2007 based applications work well at this time, right now only Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook 2007 are known to work and are supported. Prior versions of Office 2003 applications are much better supported, including support for Project 2003 and Visio 2003.

INSTALLING:

Installation of CrossOver for Mac is nearly identical to the steps outlined in the CrossOver Games review. After downloading you should be left with the file crossover-7.0.0.dmg, simply double click on this to start the installer which will then allow you to drag the CrossOver.app to your Applications folder. This should open the Applications folder Window Simply double click CrossOver to launch the application which will take you to the CrossOver welcome screen. From this point you can now either insert a Windows based application in your Optical Drive or start the CrossOver Software Installer.

As per the last article the steps for installing any application supported or unsupported are mostly the same so I will skip to the pretty screenshots and my notes



Microsoft 2007 install:



There are some parts of the install where it looks like no processing is going on, take a break and come back. Time varies between 10-20 minutes upon hitting the 75% mark.

Word 2007:



There is a warning about the normal.dot document template on start up. Not fatal but annoying none the less. Word 2007 is a little slow drawing.

Excel 2007:



The speed is a little slow like in Word 2007 but pretty good overall.

Outlook 2007:



Exchange, RPC over HTTP works good, POP/IMAP not so good unless you install IE.

Powerpoint 2003/2007, usable but a little slow....
Access 2003/2007 - Does not work, don't even try it. I hacked around with it for a while and got it to come up with the ability to have read only access to databases by installing the MDAC and JET drivers manually. It's really not worth the trouble at this time.

Project 2003:



Project 2003 - Works perfect in my limited test.

Visio 2003 - Drawing performance suffers at this time on CrossOver Mac. My inside sources tell me this is to be fixed in 7.2 with a new DIB engine.

Photoshop CS2:



Photoshop CS/CS2 - Works perfect, while mac users already have Photoshop, the Windows version might come in handy if you have plug-ins that are Windows only.

IE6: Works well enough, some minor glitches such as occasionally having to hit enter twice to naviagate to a URL but its pretty rare. CodeWeavers needs to get on the ball and figure out if there is a way to support IE7.

IE6 and Install:



OTHER FEATURES:

Because CrossOver Mac and CrossOver Games for the Mac share the same basic tools and tweaking steps, I will forgo the TWEAKING and UNSUPPORTED STUFF sections and focus on other features and information that will help to make either version of CrossOver more pleasant to work with.



Dock Integration:

I really like the integration that CrossOver provides with the Mac OS desktop. The menu and dock integration is quite nice and makes it feel quite seamless. CrossOver -> Revel in Finder -> Browse for the correct icon for your application and drag it to the Dock. Now any time you want to start your application, you can do this directly without having to start the CrossOver application and browsing through the CrossOver menus.

Multiple user support/What the heck are bottles?



Because CrossOver does a thin layer of Windows emulation to trick the applications in to thinking they are being installed on a native Windows system, a fake Windows environment representing a C drive is created. This environment is really just a folder in the file system typically located at

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/BOTTLENAME/dosdevices/c:

You should rarely if ever need to access or even be aware of this, as CrossOver maps the Documents, Desktop and Downloads locations the Windows applications expect to those folders located in your user account. However there are certain instances where the logic behind bottles does need to be explored. If for instance you have multiple users that need to share a single install of a Windows Application across multiple accounts. CrossOver provides you with the ability to do what's called Publishing a bottle where the bottle is shared across multiple user accounts. Each user then maintains a shared copy of the managed_bottle which is linked to the main managed_bottle in the main user account. Consult the documentation for more information.

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/managed_ie/dosdevices/c:



Running a command from a terminal:



Vary rarely you may run in to the situation where you need to run a command from a terminal window. I've found with some unsupported applications I need to change some command line options or view debug output. When this situation arises CrossOver gives you the ability to start a terminal with the CrossOver environment already configured. Simply go to the CrossOver menu -> Programs -> Run Command -> select the right bottle -> Open Shell

CONCLUSION:

If your application is among those supported then I highly recommend CrossOver Mac. Its a good light weight alternative to the VM based solutions of Parallels Desktop and VMware fusion. I believe CrossOver Mac is worth the current price of $59.95 even with the hiccups I have encountered. And even if your favorite application isn't currently supported I think there is value in buying the software to contribute to future Wine development. Unfortunately not everything is supported but newer applications are being added all the time. From my discussions with the CrossOver team, they have informed me that a future release will add support for Quicken 2007 and Quickbooks 2006 and 2007.

Even if your application does not work perfectly, the CodeWeavers support staff are very helpful and they maintain an application support database that might help with any problems you encounter.


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Monday, June 16, 2008

Wine-Reviews.net is now Live!

The new website of Wine-Reviews is http://wine-reviews.net or www.wine-reviews.net

We are excited to release this to you all and it is in part, the user base who give us motivation to keep writing howto's and reviews.

Please post comments on the new website and not here on blogspot. We will eventually do away with this site once we have gotten all of the other sites pointing to our new site.

Since we released the site ahead of schedule please post any feedback/issues you are having.

See you at the new site!

Please post any comments about this post to the new forum at wine-reviews.net In the near future this post will be removed from wine-review.blogspot so please visit our new and improved site and update your bookmarks.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Website update

We want to thank those of you who helped let us know issues with the new site while it was being developed.

And for everyone who loves comments, well we decided to do away with comments. Comments make it too difficult for us to provide support on our own howtos. Having to dig around posts to provide adequate and timely responses is totally unprofessional.

We have managed, with the help of Vanilla, to have a nice clean forum, but completely different than other forums providing a simple and professional look and feel. We are removing the old forum at wine-forum.org and migrating to the new forum tomorrow.

For those of you who want to contribute read the contribute page on the new site tomorrow and fill out the small form.

See you at the new site tomorrow!

Please post any comments about this post to the new forum at wine-reviews.net In the near future this post will be removed from wine-review.blogspot so please visit our new and improved site and update your bookmarks.

Monday, June 9, 2008

The Future of Wine-Review

I thought I'd share with everyone who uses this resource what the future of Wine-Review entails. I also want to thank everyone for your support over the short period of time Wine-Review has been in existence.

Nicolas Koch and I have been working a lot behind the scenes with Codeweavers posting bug reports for betas as well as testing a lot of things in the up and coming CrossOver Office Linux and Mac. Believe me when I tell you that so much work is being done to this release and it will yield amazing results. Look forward to this release and support Wine by purchasing CrossOver Office and get CrossOver Games for free!

Additionally; and here's the kicker, Nicolas and I are working on a new website that will look more professional, be easier to browse and it will not be hosted here on blogspot.com. What lies ahead is a bigger user base migrating to Linux and more and more users using Wine. So we welcome all the new users with an awesome resource Wine-Review to help you in your quest to run Windows applications on Linux.

We will bring more reviews and lots of tips and tricks to get your Windows based applications working in Linux. There will also be a slight name change of the new site, we had to do this in order to get a relevant domain name. Wine-Review .com .net .org are already taken so we had to improvise just a little.

Here is two screenshots of the new site.


We plan to invite a small group of people to help test the new site and give feedback, thoughts, ideas etc. If your interested in this just post a comment here with your contact information.. don't worry the comments are moderated and your personal contact information will never be publicly posted.

Thanks for your support!

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Wine 1.0-rc4 Released

This Page Has Been Moved: Please Note the New Location Below

We restructured the whole site and this page no longer exists on this location. The page that your looking for has been moved to a different Web address on the new and improved Wine-Reviews.net Site:


Click on the link above to go to the new location. (To maintain accessibility, we have not set up automatic redirection to the new page.) If you have a bookmark to the old page, please change it to the new address above. If you followed a link from another Web site to this page, please let the people responsible for that Web site know the new location above. If you are having trouble finding the information you want, do a search on this article at our new site.

Thanks for your understanding and Sorry for the inconvenience.

The Editors at Wine-Reviews
 


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Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Darwine 1.0-rc3 for OS X released

Darwine 1.0-rc3 for OS X released
  1. Before You install, please make sure:
    • Tiger users: install X11 from your Tiger Installation DVD
  2. download and open Darwine 1.0-rc3
  3. drag Darwine to the "/Applications" Folder
  4. to delete, just drag the folder "Darwine" to the trash
  5. to completely remove Darwine (and Windows apps) from your system delete the following files and folders:
    • /Applications/Darwine
    • ~.wine
    • ~/Library/Preferences/org.wine.winehelper.plist

TRiX an OS X winetricks frontend

TRiX is a simple frontend to Dan Kegels winetricks for wine/Darwine. Winetricks is:
Quick and dirty script to download and install various redistributable runtime libraries
So it should help to download and install certain fonts and libraries that are needed by some windows programs to run under wine.
I’d like to point a finger at the font downloads. Loads of applications on windows (an therefore wine) depend on the corefonts. These fonts are not part of wine and can’t be packed together with wine because of different licenses. So if You had apps, showing only symbols and garbage, this is for You .
Wintricks offers to install some other notable libraries and Runtimes like
  • Visual Basic runtiems
  • C++ runtimes
  • xvid, intel and ffdshow codecs for audio and video en/decoding
  • .NET 1.1/2.0 and mono 1.1/1.9
TRiX comes with cabextract and wget binaries, so it should work out of the box. It will download the current version of winetricks and install the selected items.
download TRiX



Putty for Mac
Putty for Mac
$15.00

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Monday, June 2, 2008

How-to + Benchmark: Playing Prey in Linux with Wine!

This Page Has Been Moved: Please Note the New Location Below

We restructured the whole site and this page no longer exists on this location. The page that your looking for has been moved to a different Web address on the new and improved Wine-Reviews.net Site:


Click on the link above to go to the new location. (To maintain accessibility, we have not set up automatic redirection to the new page.) If you have a bookmark to the old page, please change it to the new address above. If you followed a link from another Web site to this page, please let the people responsible for that Web site know the new location above. If you are having trouble finding the information you want, do a search on this article at our new site.

Thanks for your understanding and Sorry for the inconvenience.

The Editors at Wine-Reviews
 


Putty for Mac
Putty for Mac
$15.00

https://winereviews.onfastspring.com/putty-for-mac


Sunday, June 1, 2008

Wine-Review May poll results

This Page Has Been Moved: Please Note the New Location Below

We restructured the whole site and this page no longer exists on this location. The page that your looking for has been moved to a different Web address on the new and improved Wine-Reviews.net Site:


Click on the link above to go to the new location. (To maintain accessibility, we have not set up automatic redirection to the new page.) If you have a bookmark to the old page, please change it to the new address above. If you followed a link from another Web site to this page, please let the people responsible for that Web site know the new location above. If you are having trouble finding the information you want, do a search on this article at our new site.

Thanks for your understanding and Sorry for the inconvenience.

The Editors at Wine-Reviews
 


Putty for Mac
Putty for Mac
$15.00

https://winereviews.onfastspring.com/putty-for-mac