CodeWeavers And Linsoft Announce Linsofts 10 Year Anniversary Sale

CODEWEAVERS AND LINSOFT ANNOUNCE LINSOFT’S 10-YEAR ANNIVERSARY SALE
To Celebrate LinSoft’s 10th year in business, CrossOver Linux will be provided FREE on all LinSoft PCs until January 31st, 2011
SAINT PAUL, Minn. (December 24, 2010) — CodeWeavers, Inc. and LinSoft GmbH (www.linsoft.de), leading providers of open-source systems and tools, announced today their joint participation in LinSoft’s 10th Anniversary Sale. Effective today until January 31st, 2011, LinSoft will be providing a free license of CrossOver Linux Standard on every LinSoft Linux PC. CrossOver Linux provides the ability for users to run Windows software applications on their Linux PC without needing to purchase a Windows operating system license.

Said Jon Parshall, CodeWeavers COO, “We’re excited to be providing a great Windows compatibility solution to LinSoft’s customers—a solution that saves them time and money, and having to purchase a Windows license to run their needed applications.” Oliver Poths, LinSoft’s founder, echoed this sentiment, noting that “Linux on the desktop has always been highly cost-effective. But now it’s becoming increasing user-friendly as well. Tools like CrossOver provide Linux desktop users with a great user experience.”

Conveniently timed around the Christmas holiday, Poths noted further, “This offer makes a great Christmas present, or even an after-Christmas present, if Santa hasn’t brought you a Linux PC down the chimney.”

About CodeWeavers
Founded in 1996 as a general software consultancy, CodeWeavers focuses on the development of Wine – the core technology found in all of its CrossOver products. The company's goal is to bring expanded market opportunities for Windows software developers by making it easier, faster and more painless to port Windows software to Linux. CodeWeavers is recognized as a leader in open-source Windows porting technology, and maintains development offices in Minnesota, the United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world. The company is privately held. For more information about CodeWeavers, log on to www.CodeWeavers.com.

CodeWeavers CrossOver Multi-User Pricing Discounts save up to 43% off full retail

With the recent announcement that the Russian government will mandate A shift from Microsoft to Linux by 2015. I started thinking about what the Russians will do if they have some Windows Applications that don't have Linux equivalents at this time.

One option would be to keep some Microsoft Windows boxes around to run a small number of critical applications. Another option would be for the government to fund the development or porting of the needed applications to Linux. A third option would be they could run the applications on CodeWeavers CrossOver Pro on Linux and save the Windows licences and any development or porting cost.

This isn't just for Russia, this is also true for many other countries around the world that's making the shift away from Microsoft Windows to Linux.

Then their is smaller state and local governments that are also making the shift to Linux. And for smaller governments the cost to develop or to port a custom application to Linux might be prohibitive. But with the purchase of volume CrossOver licences the cost would remain within budget. As the local government would save the cost of the Windows licence that's allot more expensive then the cost of CrossOver.

Next is educational institutions, have you ever thought how much the worlds educational institutions would save by making the move away from Windows to Linux? And how the savings could be used for actually educating our children and young adults.

Then their is the power user who has two or more computers that run Linux or Mac and who wants the option to run certain windows applications or games on their operating system of choice. With a volume purchase of two or more licences you can receive a discount off the full retail price.

Lastly I would suggest LUG users or people who have friends who also use Linux or Mac to setup a home brew Groupon. And one person take every ones order and then make the volume purchase for the discounted price. This way everyone in the group gets a higher discount as more licences can be purchased at a single time.

So how does volume licensing work?

For example if you purchase 2 to 9 licenses you will receive a 5.6% discount off the normal retail selling price of $69.95 and as you can see in the table below the more licenses you purchase in a single block the higher the discount received. The maximum discount goes up to 43% off retail for 1000 or more licenses purchased at a single time. While a $40,000 purchase might seem like allot to a single user, this is well within range of normal software purchases for large business, educational intuitions, and government of all sizes.

For more information on CodeWeavers volume licencing click this link.

SKU pricing Table

Prices for Currency: ($) US Dollar

Name	SKU	Qty Range	List Price Each	Vendor Price Each	Vendor Support Extension Price Each
CrossOver Mac Professional	cxmac
		1 - 1	$69.95	$69.95	$35.00
		2 - 9	$66.00	$66.00	$32.00
		10 - 24	$63.00	$63.00	$29.00
		25 - 49	$60.00	$60.00	$26.00
		50 - 99	$56.00	$56.00	$24.00
		100 - 499	$52.00	$52.00	$21.00
		500 - 999	$45.00	$45.00	$18.00
		1000+	$40.00	$40.00	$15.00
CrossOver Mac Standard	cxmacstd
		1+	$39.95	$39.95	$39.95
CrossOver Linux Professional	cxpro
		1 - 1	$69.95	$69.95	$35.00
		2 - 9	$66.00	$66.00	$32.00
		10 - 24	$63.00	$63.00	$29.00
		25 - 49	$60.00	$60.00	$26.00
		50 - 99	$56.00	$56.00	$24.00
		100 - 499	$52.00	$52.00	$21.00
		500 - 999	$45.00	$45.00	$18.00
		1000+	$40.00	$40.00	$15.00

Educational Discounts

CodeWeavers strongly believes in the power of open-source solutions to help deliver critically needed software at reasonable prices to educational institutions worldwide.

CodeWeavers Crossover Come To The Light Sale

Codeweavers offers downloads of its Crossover Games for $39.95 and Crossover Professional for $69.95 If you apply coupon code "ComeToTheLight" this will drop CrossOver Games to $29.96 And Crossover Professional to $52.46 That's 20% off and the lowest total price we've seen since a 1-day sale in October 2009. CrossOver enables you to install Windows applications and games on Intel-based Macs and Linux.

Update 04/06/2023 : The ComeToTheLight dealcode has expired, you can now use "TOM23" as your dealcode and save 20% off CrossOver for Mac and Linux.

The new and improved CodeWeavers CrossOver version 9.2.1 was recently released, So if you need a Windows Application or Games to run on Linux or Mac OS X this is your chance to get it at 25% off the normal selling price.

CrossOver 9.2.1 contains many fixes to existing applications, and just generally makes the product better. As of this writing CrossOver has been merged with Wine 1.2.1 and contains many improvements for Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, Quicken, PhotoShop and many other supported and none supported applications.

Second, the folks at CodeWeavers have re-written the entire user interface from scratch, and have created what they feel is a more intuitive installation process and user experience. The new user interface is written in GTK and the look and feel is much more intuitive then the older Tcl/TK UI that was used before this upcoming release.

Third, and perhaps most important, the CrossOver installer will now be directly linked to their online Compatibility database and allow people to install unsupported software via (recipes) contained on the Compatibility Center.

Here is a screenshot of the Crossover Professional 9.0 (UI) user interface.


Keep in mind this sale is for a limited time only, and may be discontinued at any time.

A Guide to Wine on Ubuntu for Beginners

This guide is divided in four parts, so that you can jump to whichever you want using the links below:

What Is Wine?
Installing Wine in Ubuntu (Two Methods)
Starting Up and Configuring Wine
Customizing Wine

What Is Wine?

Wine is a compatibility layer which allows Windows applications to run on Linux by translating Windows system calls into native Linux calls. Wine runs successfully a variety of Windows applications and games on Linux - the official website offers an application database which organizes those depending on how well they perform under Wine, known issues and solutions, screenshots and helpful comments.

You should give Wine a try if you have some Windows-only game or application that you really need and want to be able to use Linux for it.

Installing Wine in Ubuntu (Two Methods)

I will approach two different ways of installing the latest Wine release in Ubuntu: using the Wine PPA and compiling from source.
Using the Wine PPA

This method is pretty straightforward. First, we need to make sure that we uninstall any older version of Wine:

sudo apt-get remove --purge wine

Now, let's add the Wine PPA repository to our sources.list file:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

Finally, update the package lists and install Wine:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install wine

This should be all.

Compiling Wine from source

This is usually not needed considering there is an updated repository available, but sometimes the PPA repository may have a delay until the packages are built and uploaded. Usually this happens immediately after a new version of Wine is released and there are no updated packages in the PPA. This is where compiling Wine from source could come in handy. Also, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat comes with the latest stable release of Wine, which is 1.2, so if you want the latest development release you will need to install it from the PPA or compile it from source.

First, make sure you have the sources repositories enabled, meaning a line that starts with deb-src is in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, like the following:

deb-src http://ro.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick universe multiverse

If not, add it and save the file. Also, make sure to replace maverick with your actual Ubuntu version. Sources are enabled by default in Ubuntu, so you will probably need to do nothing at this step, unless you commented or deleted this line yourself.

Next, let's install the compilation tools, the needed development libraries and additional Wine dependencies:

sudo apt-get build-dep wine

sudo apt-get install libgsm1-dev libmpg123-dev

The first command will fetch the needed development libraries needed by Wine, together with the compilation tools like gcc. The second one will install two additional development libraries. Now, download the source tarball from the official website (direct link here), and then uncompress it by typing in a terminal (don't forget to make sure the current working directory is the one where you saved the tarball):

tar -xjf wine-1.3.9.tar.bz2

I used the latest version available at the time of writing, but replace the version number accordingly if it differs.

Next, enter in wine-1.3.9 directory and issue the following commands to compile and install it:

./configure

make

sudo make install

This will take a while, but in the end Wine should be properly installed. Alternately, you can specify a different installation prefix from the default, e.g.:

./configure --prefix=/home/USER/usr

In this case Wine will use /home/USER/usr (replace USER with your actual username) as the installation prefix, and you can issue make install as normal user, without the need of sudo. Notice that in this example Wine would install inside /home/USER/usr/bin/wine, so if you specify a different prefix don't forget to include the path to the Wine binary in your $PATH. Also notice that for older versions of Wine the commands needed to compile it should be ./configure; make depend && make; sudo make install.

If you need to uninstall Wine, issue the following command from within the wine-1.3.9 directory:

sudo make uninstall

Configuring Wine :

Winecfg

winecfg is used to configure Wine and change settings like sound, graphics, Windows version and so on. Wine uses the winecfg utility for configuration, which you can start either by typing winecfg in a terminal or pressing Alt+F2 and typing it there, followed by Enter. Note that the default settings usually will do, so it's not necessary to change the configuration options after installing Wine. When it starts for the first time, winecfg will prompt you to install Gecko, a web rendering engine used to embed HTML in applications (the same engine which is used by Firefox). It is recommended that you install it.



If you don't install Gecko now, you'll be prompted later when it is needed by some application or you will be able to install it manually using the winetricks script (which is explained below this section). After installing Gecko, let's have a look at the Wine configuration window:



I'll briefly explain each tab:

• Applications tab: this is used to set different Windows versions for different applications. The default (Windows XP) should be fine for most of them.
• Libraries tab: here you can add dynamic link libraries (DLLs) and specify whether they should be a Wine builtin or a native Windows binary; this will be used to copy various libraries needed by certain games or applications to run properly.
• Graphics tab: in this tab you can specify graphics settings, emulate a virtual desktop and choose its resolution, change Direct3D vertex shader options and set fonts dots per inch (DPI).
• Desktop Integration tab: in this tab you will be able to change the look of Windows applications that run through Wine, and also to change the theme which it uses (this is explained below in the section Customizing Wine).
• Drives tab: this tab allows you to set drive mappings, which will give Wine access to certain devices and drives on your system. Default is usually fine, but you may need to add an optical drive here for applications which require the CD or DVD.
• Audio tab: the first time you click on this tab a message window will appear notifying you that a recommended driver has been selected. Click OK, then in the Audio tab click Apply. You can also test the sound using the Test Sound button. Default settings should be fine.
• About tab: optionally you can fill in the Owner and Organization text fields (anything will do).

Winetricks

Winetricks is a powerful script which automates installation of various useful packages, offering a friendly interface to do so. Before downloading and using winetricks, first let's install the cabextract package, which is a native Linux application that extracts Microsoft Cabinet files (CAB), and is available in the repositories.