An introduction to CrossOver Office and Games for FreeBSD

Written by Tom Wickline
Tuesday, 22 June 2010 03:49

What exactly is CrossOver FreeBSD?

CrossOver for FreeBSD is a commercial variant of Wine released by CodeWeavers with (currently) limited support for many of today's most popular office application and games. CrossOver Office and Games for FreeBSD is tested for performance and stability with many of todays most popular games such as Guild Wars, Eve Online, and Steam games like Half-Life 2 and Portal. As well as many of todays most popular Office application such as Microsoft Office 97 to 2007, Quicken, Quickbooks, Photoshop, Internet Explorer and many other not mentioned applications.

Minimum system requirements

FreeBSD :

An x86 based FreeBSD distribution based on glibc 2.3 or greater
Perl 5 or greater
IJG JPEG library (libjpeg)
python >= 2.4
gtk2 >= 2.10
python-gtk2 >= 2.10
It is also recommended that you have a web browser installed.
100MB of available disk space (plus space for the Windows applications)
128MB of RAM

Currently Unsupported builds of CrossOver FreeBSD

Currently the only way to get CrossOver Office or Games for FreeBSD is to first purchase a Linux licence of CrossOver. After your purchase you can then go to "My Downloads" (Your Downloads) and then select the "Unsupported Downloads" tab and then select the CrossOver FreeBSD tab. At this time you can download both CrossOver Office and Games 8.0 and the new 9.0 release from CodeWeavers.

Wine 1.2-rc4 Released

Written by Tom Wickline
Saturday, 19 June 2010 11:14

The Wine development release 1.2-rc4 is now available. Whats new in this release: Many translation updates. A lot of bug fixes. The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations. Bugs fixed in 1.2-rc4:
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wisotool 20100618 released

Written by Tom Wickline
Saturday, 19 June 2010 03:36

Dan Kegel released wisotool 20100618 today: 19 new verbs (blur, spore, photoshop cs5, ...), and 75 old ones.

wisotool is a handy winetricks like script for automatically installing games from .iso or .mds files copied from your own dvds (or, if the game is freely downloadable, it will download it). Just like winetricks, it is intended to make testing Wine easier, but might be useful for people who simply want to install games.
Unlike winetricks, wisotool is quiet by default, it doesnt ask any questions (except, for now, it prompts for your password so it can mount the .iso file).

Wisotool currently supports about 95 games and/or benchmarks (see below). Please consider contributing support for your favorite game, its not (too) hard. Im especially interested in recent or beta games, ideally wisotool would support good games or betas on or near their day of release.

Changes since version 20100530:

winetricks 20100618 released

Written by Tom Wickline
Saturday, 19 June 2010 03:16

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20100618 today: new verbs dxsdk_nov2006, windowscodecs Another month, another Winetricks. Changes:
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How to Become a Linux Gamer

Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 14 June 2010 02:45

There are several resources out there to assist you in being a Linux gamer. The WINE project is a great, free example of this as it allows you to run Windows programs (and games) on Linux. CodeWeavers CrossOver software also allows you to do the same but the difference is that theres a cost associated with this software. Today, though, were going to introduce you to another option for being a Linux gamer the Linux-Gamers project.

HOWTO Install Wine Offline

Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 14 June 2010 02:25

Something that is difficult to do in Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is installing packages on a system without an active internet connection. This is a brief HOWTO for easily installing packages on an offline Ubuntu system. In order to do this you will need another system (preferably something with Linux) that has an active internet connection as well as a flash drive.
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A Windows style Fix to a WINE Problem

Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 14 June 2010 02:12

"Author: Jacob Barkdull"

The problem with emulating Windows -- or since "WINE Is Not an Emulator" I should say: the problem with developing a "Windows Compatibility Layer" -- is you end up having the same problems Windows has. If WINE is compatible with anything, it seems to be mostly with Windows flaws. :)

If you remember "Microsoft Windows XP" you may be aware of Windows little problem of keeping too many "temporary" files for too long (I don't know if this is still a problem with Vista and 7.) These files can be Internet files (web cache, history, downloaded files, and Internet Explorers apparent backups of these files) or ".bak" files, etc. All of these files over a year or two of usage can make up a total size anywhere between 3 to 15 gigabytes. That's a lot of hard drive space used simply for files that are supposed to be temporary.

Icewind Dale with Crossover Games

Written by Tom Wickline
Monday, 14 June 2010 01:52

This video is a overview of Character creation in Icewind Dale using CodeWeavers CrossOver Games in Linux Mint 9 the game also plays extremely well in other Linux distributions and Mac OS X with CXGames 9.0
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Wine 1.2-rc3 Released

Written by Tom Wickline
Friday, 11 June 2010 13:13

The Wine development release 1.2-rc3 is now available.

Whats new in this release:

Many translation updates.
A lot of bug fixes.

The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

Bugs fixed in 1.2-rc3:

Written by Tom Wickline
Wednesday, 09 June 2010 02:58

By Steven Rosenberg :

One of the hiccups in Bordeaux, a for-profit, costs-$20 implementation of Wine that allows for easy installation of a variety of Windows applications in Unix/Linux environments, is that while installing the IrfanView image editor is clickably easy, users are on their own when it comes to the IrfanView plugins.

In my workflow, the IrfanView plugins are an essential part of the IrfanView experience. That's a fancy way of saying I need the plugins.

I managed to get those plugins installed the last time I installed Bordeaux (and for the record, Im a paying customer), and along with some incompatibility between the newer Wine base supplied by Bordeaux and the older environment of Debian Lenny, the experience wasn't as smooth as it should be.

In distributions built with newer packages, such as Ubuntu, the Wine supplied with Bordeaux should work well (in Debian all I had to do was use the distros own, older Wine and all began working).

And with support for easy installation of the IrfanView plugins, Bordeaux should make the installation of Windows applications under Wine even easier than before.

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