Windows on Linux

Switching to Linux is easy if you know how to run Windows applications on it.
For many users considering switching to Linux the biggest hurdle is a question of whether they can find a suitable replacement for their favourite Windows applications. While sites like LinuxAppFinder list hundreds of open source application alternatives it's not always as straight forward as that. Many users are bound, for one or other reason, to using a particular application, be it because there is no way to convert existing data or because company policy demands they use a particular application. Fortunately there are a number of ways to run a good deal of Windows applications on Linux.

Wine
Wine stands for "Wine is Not an Emulator" and is one of the most common methods of running Windows applications on Linux. Wine is available in most popular Linux distributions and as its name says, it is not actually a Windows emulator but is able to run Windows applications. Unlike virtualisation software Wine doesn't require that an existing copy of Windows is running to be able to run applications. Wine is basically a loader than executes a binary and a library that executes Windows API calls in a way that Unix and Linux can understand. Wine is very capable today and can run a wide range of Windows applications including Office, Photoshop and just about all current games. The Wine site maintains an extensive database of applications that can be run on Linux with instructions of how to set them up.

Cedega
Although Wine runs many popular Windows-based games, if you're serious about gaming then it's worth looking at Cedega, otherwise known as Transgaming. Cedega is a commercial version of Wine (originally called WineX) with a strong focus on gaming. It is a subscription service and provides a frontend to Wine with additional scripts to get games up and running quickly. Originally Cedega offered one of the best ways to run games on Linux but of late Wine has made such progress that Cedega's value is diminishing.
Nevertheless, for certain specific situations Cedaga could be the answer.

Crossover
Formerly known as CrossOver Office, CrossOver is a collection of four commercial applications that allow Windows applications to run on Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. The four are CrossOver Mac, CrossOver Linux, CrossOver Games Mac, and CrossOver Games Linux. The Linux standard version costs $39.00 and the professional version $69.00, which is not too hefty a price tag for something that can run applications such as Microsoft Office, Project, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Quicken as well as many other applications. The CrossOver Mac, Linux and Games editions are designed for desktop use while the CrossOver Server edition allows Windows applications to run in thin client environments.

CrossOver Linux 9 Run Windows apps without Windows

A new version expands the number of Windows applications you can run on Linux.

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for ComputerWorld :

Some Linux users insist that anything you can do on Windows, you can do better on Linux. While there's some truth to that, many of us have Windows applications that make completely leaving Windows close to impossible. That's where CodeWeavers' latest version of CrossOver Linux comes in.
CrossOver Linux 9 (code-named Snow Mallard) and its Mac brother, CrossOver Mac 9, let you run many popular Windows applications on Linux or Mac OS X. Supported Windows applications include Microsoft Office (from Office 97 to Office 2007), Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Outlook 2002 to 2007, all current versions of Quicken up to 2010 and QuickBooks up to 2004, and some versions of Photoshop and Photoshop CS. Based on my experience with CrossOver, which goes back more than a decade, I'd say this new version supports about 20% more applications (at a level that most users would find usable) than the last one.
CrossOver is based on the open-source project Wine, an implementation of the Windows API on top of the Unix/Linux operating system family. Wine is a mature project involving almost 17 years of work to get Windows applications to run on Unix and Linux systems.
Actually, you don't need CrossOver Linux to run Windows applications on Linux. You can do it with Wine alone -- if you know exactly what you're doing. What CrossOver brings to the table is automated installation of Windows applications, and technical support. And in this latest version, the CrossOver interface has been improved so it's easier than ever to install and manage Windows applications.

Installing CrossOver

To see how well CrossOver Linux 9 does its job, I tested it on two systems. The first was a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. The machine had 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive and an integrated Intel 3100 GMA chip set. It was running the Debian-based MEPIS 8 desktop Linux distribution.

Installing Windows applications in the new CrossOver is as easy as pick and click.

I also tried CrossOver 9 on an older Gateway 503GR with a 3-GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 250 graphics card and a 300GB SATA drive. It was running Ubuntu 9.10.
Both systems had more than enough horsepower to run multiple Windows and Linux applications simultaneously. In fact, CodeWeavers claims that any 32-bit system that runs at 200 MHz can run CrossOver. (The program will run on a 64-bit system, but only if it has the 32-bit compatibility library installed. So even the 64-bit version is really a 32-bit application platform.)
CrossOver also requires that your Linux include Glibc 2.3.x or greater and X11R6 3.3 or greater. XFree86 4 with XRender and FreeType support is recommended. In short, CrossOver will run on any modern Linux distro on almost any PC.

There are several ways to install CrossOver. CodeWeavers recommends that you use its installation shell script, but if you'd rather use your Linux desktop's installation program, CrossOver also comes in RPM versions for Red Hat, Fedora and openSUSE, and DEB editions for Debian and the Ubuntu family. They both work just fine.

The one problem I found is that there's no upgrade path if you already have an earlier version of CrossOver Linux installed. I had to manually uninstall my older edition of CrossOver before I could put in the new program. CrossOver includes an uninstall option, so that wasn't a problem, but the instructions don't tell you that you'll need to zap your old version before installing the new one.

Putting CrossOver to the test

Once installed, CrossOver 9 has a new GUI that works equally well with both KDE and GNOME. (There's a known bug that prevents CrossOver menus from appearing on KDE 4.4, the most recent version. Hopefully, that will be addressed soon.)

Installing Windows applications is a snap. From the CrossOver interface, you can easily choose which Windows applications you want to install from a supplied list of supported applications. You can also install applications that are not "officially" supported -- for example, my favorite HTML editor, NoteTab, also runs well on CrossOver 9, even though it's not on the list of supported applications.

In this latest version of CrossOver, you also have the option of installing useful Windows components apart from the actual applications. For example, I was able to install the most common Windows fonts, such as Arial and Times Roman, as well as the .Net Framework 3.0 and Visual C++ 6.0 redistributable libraries.

For the most part, the Windows applications I installed ran without trouble. I work with Word 2003 documents, Excel 2003 spreadsheets, IE 7 and complex Quicken 2009 financial statements quite comfortably. It wasn't perfect, though -- some of the icons appeared blotchy. It was never enough to make a program unusable, but it was enough to make them unattractive.
In addition, I would also occasionally need to force a screen refresh when one Windows application's window covered up another. When I'd reveal the "lower" application, the part of it that had been covered by the other Windows application wouldn't render properly. After running a command with the new foreground application, however, the program's screen reappeared as it should.

Two versions

You can download a free 30-day trial version of CrossOver Linux; if you like it, it costs $39.95. You can also get CrossOver Linux Professional ($69.95), which can be used for multiple users and comes with CrossOver Games.

CrossOver Games includes support for DirectX, Microsoft's graphics APIs for games. With this, many Windows games will run well on Linux -- I had no problem blasting monsters in World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. CrossOver Games is also available separately for $39.95

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How to run windows games or programs on mac or linux without bootcamp

Hello everybody today we look at how to run windows games and programs on a mac using software called CrossOver Games, created by CodeWeavers.

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Microsoft Office 2007 on OpenSolaris

Today I thought I would show everyone just how easy it is to install and use Microsoft Office 2007 on OpenSolaris 2009.06 and 2010.03 with Bordeaux for Solaris. I have installed Office 2007 on both 2009.06 and 2010.03 build 134 the screenshots below are from 2009.06 running in Virtual Box.

The first thing you will need to do is make sure you have all the needed software dependencies resolved on OpenSolaris. Here is the list of needed packages from the Bordeaux OpenSolaris 2.0.2 readme.

Bordeaux bundles Wine 1.1.36 and uses many third party libraries that can
be found in the OpenSolaris repository and the Contrib repository.

Information on how to add the Contrib repository can be found here :

http://wikis.sun.com/display/OpenSolarisInfo/How+To+Add+IPS+Repositories

Wine also uses the packages listed below depending on the software in use.

SUNWlcms = Little Color Management System
SUNWsmba = samba - A Windows SMB/CIFS fileserver for UNIX
SUNWsane-backend = SANE library and backends
SUNWxsane = Graphical scanning frontend for the SANE scanner interface.
SUNWlldap = LDAP Libraries
SUNWopenssl = OpenSSL Commands

The next thing you will need to do is purchase a copy of Bordeaux if you haven't already done so. After you install Bordeaux you can start the UI two different ways.

1) Thought the Applications Menu shortcut
2) Via the command line, open your terminal and enter :

$ /opt/bordeaux/bin/bordeaux-setup

After the bordeaux UI starts all you have to do is double click Office 2007 and the install will begin, its that simple... But If you run the UI through your terminal you can then see everything that's taking place in the background.

Once the install begins it will install some needed third party dependencies and it also installs all of the Microsoft Core Fonts for you. After this has completed a run dialog will appear and ask you for the location of the Office Installer, simply browse to where the setup.exe is located and select it, and then Office will start it's install.

Microsoft Office 2007 key verification.

Microsoft Office 2007 EULA.

Choose your Installation settings.

Microsoft Office 2007 install completed on OpenSolaris.

Microsoft Office 2007 Application Menu's

After the install has completed you have three ways to exec and run a program

1) Through the Applications shortcut menu
2) Open your terminal and enter $ bin/winword07 , excel07 or powerpnt07
3) Open your terminal and set the current working wineprefix :

$ export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.bordeaux/office2007"

then change directory to the location of the executable, example :

$ cd /export/home/tom/.bordeaux/office2007/drive_c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Office/Office12

and then start the program (MS Word) like this :

$ /opt/bordeaux/bin/wine winword.exe

Option three is good for Microsoft Publisher and OneNote as we don't provide shortcuts in the user bin directory at this time. Also with option two and three you can see whats going on while the application is running.

Microsoft Word 2007 on OpenSolaris.

Microsoft Excel 2007 on OpenSolaris.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 on OpenSolaris.

Microsoft OneNote 2007 on OpenSolaris.

Microsoft Publisher 2007 on OpenSolaris.

Microsoft Outlook will run, but at this time it's not usable. I also tried to run Groove and Access but they both crashed on execution.

If you don't want to spend $25.00 for Bordeaux you also have the option to download the Wine source code and compile Wine with it's needed dependencies. Once this is done you will need to install all the needed windows redistributable dependencies and then install Office for free. The old saying goes time is money, and for only $25.00 Bordeaux will save you many hours of work. But then again if you like to tinker compiling Wine on your own might be the way to go.

B.T.W Bordeaux also runs on Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD and Mac OSX... And is being ported to StormOS and Nexenta at this time.

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