Written by Tom Wickline

Tuesday, 21 July 2009 23:44

Introduction

Bordeaux is a Wine GUI configuration manager that runs winelib applications. It also supports installation of third party utilities, installation of applications and games, and the ability to use custom configurations. Bordeaux is written in GTK and requires GTK 2.10 or higher to be installed on a given system. Bordeaux also uses wget and cabextract extensively and they should be installed for Bordeaux to operate correctly.

Getting Bordeuax 1.8.0

Bordeaux is a commercial product which is currently available only as a download and cost from ($20.00) to ($25.00) depending on your architecture A DVD version is planned for the 2.x release and will cost a little extra for the media.

Their is no free demo of Bordeaux available at this time, this will also change with the 2.x release but instead of a time restricted demo Bordeaux 2.x will have a free non restricted limited version that will install a couple standard applications and let the user get a feel for the application. Then if they choose they can purchase the full version and have access to all the supported applications and support.

Installing Bordeaux 1.8.0

Their is a .sh installer for Linux, Free-BSD and Solaris
Their is also .deb and .rpm packages for Linux
Their is a .pbi package for PC-BSD
Their is a .dmg package in a tar.gz for Mac

To install Bordeaux I became root and used the following command:

dpkg -i bordeaux-linux.x86.deb

Supported Platforms

Bordeaux 1.8.0 is built for Linux, BSD, Solaris and a Mac beta is currently available. The product has been tested on:

Ubuntu 8.04 and higher, Fedora, OpenSuse, Mandrake, and Gentoo
FreeBSD 7.1, 7.2
PC-BSD 7.1
Opensolaris 2008.11, 2009.06
Mac OSX 10.5.7 and higher

Bordeuax should run on all current Linux distributions

Supported Software

Bordeaux 1.8.0 currently supports

Microsoft Office 2007
Microsoft Office 2003
Microsoft Office 2000
Microsoft Office 97
Microsoft Office Visio 2003
Microsoft Office Project 2003
Adobe Photoshop 6
Adobe Image Ready 3
Adobe Photoshop 7
Adobe Image Ready 7
Adobe Photoshop CS
Adobe Photoshop CS2
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
Steam and Steam based Games

Please note Office 2007 isn't supported on Solaris at this time.

Installing Software with Bordeaux

For this review I have installed three applications that I have that Bordeaux supports. IE 6 which is a free download, Adobe (PhotoShop 7) I know its a little behind the times but it's the latest version I own. And I also have Microsoft Office 2007.

To install a application in Bordeaux just go to your Applications menu then Bordeaux and select "Install Windows Applications" and Bordeaux will start up.

Once Bordeaux is running just double click on Application you want to install and their scripts will install any needed libraries for you.

The install of IE 6 is simple, I just started Bordeaux and double clicked IE 6 and the install proceeded without and problems. All I had to do was follow the install and answer a couple installation related questions.

PhotoShop 7 was just as easy as IE 6, I just double clicked PhotoShop 7 and the install started. After Bordeaux installed some needed libraries a dialog came up and ask me to browse to the install media. I then browsed to my PhotoShop 7 CD and and selected setup.exe and the install proceeded. After the install completed I had short cuts for PhotoShop 7 and Image Ready 7 in my Applications menu under Wine > Programs.

To run PhotoShop 7 all I had to do was go to Applications > Wine and click on the shortcut and PhotoShop started up and ran as expected.

Microsoft Office 2007 installation goes just like IE 6 and PhotShop 7 just double click the field in Bordeaux and the install starts and runs with any problems. The main difference in the install is when the install reaches about 75% it seems to slow down, I can see that its still working in the background and after about a 10 minute wait the install successfully completed.

Shortcuts for Office 2007 were also added under Applications > Wine > Programs Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 are supported and run at virtually native windows speed on my Ubuntu system. With the limited testing ive done so far the only problem ive ran into is sometimes the equation editor doesn't display fonts as expected, other then that everything has worked as expected.

Full Review

Comments

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dude, why?

david 2009-07-22 07:03:38

there is already crossover office, and i bet that I like their software much better. They have
support for IE7. So why some other shitty douchebag shell for wine. Real linux users just do not use
windows software.

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Good review...

Brian 2009-07-22 07:23:35

I have been curious about Bordeaux for some time. I've used CrossOver Office in the past and
competition is always better for the end users.

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Real...

NoCaDrummer 2009-07-22 07:27:21

Well, first, I guess it's good your mother doesn't read this column, because she'd wash your mouth
out with soap for your language.

Second, "Real linux users just do not use windows
software." Yes, and "Real men don't eat quiche." News flash - real men will eat just
about anything. And real linux users may, on occasion, HAVE to use Windows software, if only to
interface with 90% of the PCs in the world. (Likewise, Windows users will have to interface with
Linux, if only because the web servers they browse probably use it.)

Is this solution the best?
Maybe, maybe not. I work for a non-profit, so my money's a little tight, and I don't have that much
need to run Windows software at home, so I'm not spending the $20. But any information about such
software is of interest nevertheless.

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Tom Wickline 2009-07-23 02:49:40

Thanks for the kind words Brian and NoCaDrummer :)

Next week we plan to release 1.8.2 for
Linux FreeBSD and OpenSolaris and this release will add QuickTime 6.5.2 stand alone player
and IrfanView 4.25 support. I'm also looking into getting QT 7.x plugin to work in FireFox
3.5.1 and some other small changes between now and release.

We have also bundled
cabextract,wget and uzip into 1.8.2 so now people wont have to worry about those deps.. We
changed the .sh installer and nnow its just a shell installer. People who used the old .sh
installer were in a terminal anyway and this reduces the size of the installer and removes
the dependency for py-gtk and pango.

I will point out we offer a (no questions asked) 30
day refund so it's hard to loose if you dont like the software.

Anyone who buys Bordeaux
now can have early access to the 1.8.2 build for testing. Also we have a bordeaux-beta
mailing list in place for testing early builds like this one...

Cheers,

Tom

QuickTime
6.5.2 on OpenSolaris, it runs on Linux and BSD of course.

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PlayOnLinux

davemc 2009-07-23 03:31:48

There is an app called PlayOnLinux, and also WorkOnLinux (same app) that is just as good, if not
better, than both Crossover and this Bordeaux that is free and open source for using Wine. It
includes dozens of community contributed scripts for installing various Windows apps. Give that a
spin for yourself and review and I think you will find that free and community driven projects are
always superior in every way.

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Tom Wickline 2009-07-23 12:48:47

Well we defiantly believe in choice, as you can see we have banners to both CrossOver and
PlayOnLinux on the right side. As for being better... Maybe in some circumstances, but at the same
time I feel Bordeaux has its strong points as well. It's all about choice and that's always a good
thing.

Cheers,

Tom

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