Submitted by CrossOver Office, the Windows API emulation framework for GNU/Linux, is finally at version 5.0 after some delay. While CrossOver has always been useful but never quite perfect, this new release is a breakthrough in Windows compatibility and GNU/Linux desktop integration. If you’ve been in “wait and see” mode with CrossOver Office, this is the release that should push you toward it. Read a review of the newest release here.
onkpo crossover good ware. i buy mondaj. impressing with stability. think worthful. recommend it.
thank you for read my first article on http://www.osnews.com
bu-tau wong
Welcome to OSNews, I see you have already met the -1 muppets.
me mod -1 not fair. honest post was. dont kill for worse english me
Yoda…is that you?
I guess moderation isn’t working any more. I suspect these stupid posts are part of the reason that the whole thread died with no meaningful discussion.
And why would people have modded that up?
discuss.
at teh s’ssl.. u bumps.. r u?
Well, with support for Photoshop 7, several years old, I doubt I’ll buy CrossOverOffice if I have Photoshop CS 2 which is wayyyy better than Photoshop 7. I have no need to run MS Office now that OO.o 2.0 is out. No support for Dreamweaver and Flash 8.
All I need: CrossOver Office doesn’t support it. Among all that CrossOver Office supports, I don’t use anything.
Indeed Wine supports Photoshop 7, quicktime is useless(linux has quicktime codecs) and MSoffice is totally useless with OO.o 2.o, Abiword, Koffice about.
Wine and winetools runs what Crossover does anyway apart from MSOffice2003?, but thats not a good enough reason to pay twice.
Get yourself a job where MS Office is used and try to open even simple docuemnts created under latest OOo. I just wasted hours fixing issues this week, again.
The documents were simple text, 2 pages, at the end there were signature field with a bit of TAB-ing in there… I was surprised that compatibility is still so bad. (MSOffice 2000)
Except for MS office and a few other token apps. The promise of being able to run any windows app has not made meaningfull progress in literally years. I periodically try and download and run some random app for windows, frequently very simple apps, and they pretty much always have something major wrong with them. Aside from the rated gold/silver/bronze apps that codeweavers focuses on, cxoffice just doesn’t work well enough for real use.
Regarding MS office by itself, it works ok for home use, is unusable in a networked samba + nfs environment. Why? File locking is broken. That is an absolute deal breaker for any office environment since without file locking, file corruption is inevitable. There have been bugs on this for quite some time. When I posted asking why it wasn’t fixed they told me to file a bug with the fs developers. I laughed out loud (really lol) at that and told them *they* should get it fixed, not me.
There are several other annoying things that never seem to go away but seriously detract from the user experience. For example, if you use alt-tab or some such key combination to switch windows or desktops so that the cx app loses focus, alt and/or ctrl will get stuck. So then I alt-tab away from then back to MS Word. I hit ‘q’ and my window closes because I just typed ctrl-q. Not good. I get it. I know to tap ctrl and alt twice every time I focus a cx application. My mom would just freak out if this happened to her. So would the receptionist at my office. This is a major major UI bug and it has been the codeweavers bug tracking database for (no joke) over 3 years! Is it listed on the “known issues” page??? No of course not, and neither is the issue with file locking. So there are major known bugs, they choose not to acknowledge them, and that is just not acceptable.
Unfortunately, for an large office environment where we work extensively with other companies that use MS Office, OpenOffice 2.0 isn’t much better. Mainly because of its still shaky importers. On its own, nice app. As an MS Office standin where formatting is important, not acceptable either. At my office we have reluctantly adopted a policy of using rdesktop to get to windows apps from our linux desktops (engineering fabless semiconductor). This sucks but it works. The other options suck less but they have major deal breakers associated with them.
These guys (codeweavers and OO) have to realize that features and apps are nice. I encourage that develepment. But there is nice and there is something that is a *total dealbreaker*. They need to identify the dealbreakers and fix that before implementing new features. Widespread adoption in the business work anyway will go nowhere until this happens no matter how nice these suites become.
OO:
– perfect MS Office filters, including embedded docs and data sources. Once this happens, my company and thousands of others will begin switching, but not before.
– Outlook, outlook, outlook. Without outlook exchange interoperability, you are dead. Please, people, don’t say Evolution. The exchange plugin is non-functioning. Plain and simple. I have twice had my money refunded from Ximian because they basically admitted it didn’t really work. Since it has been open sourced it has not improved at all.
– Visio. Make it simple, pretty and again it needs good import export filters. Making this 100% compatible with the real visio is probably a lot less important than with Word but the app needs to exist.
CX:
– File locking
– Network transparency for \ urls
– Fix the damn alt-tab stuff!
– stability and other stuff is really getting pretty good otherwise.
Like I said, I think it is amazing that these guys have been so close for so long and yet can’t figure out that they are so close and fix the things that block widespread adoption.
“Except for MS office and a few other token apps. The promise of being able to run any windows app has not made meaningfull progress in literally years.”
I understand you’re trying to make your point, but there has been a great deal of progress lately. The winecfg utility alone is a huge improvement in usability.
“Regarding MS office by itself, it works ok for home use, is unusable in a networked samba + nfs environment. Why? File locking is broken.”
Well, file locking won’t work over SMB, with samba or windows networking. If MS Office works correctly over NFS on Windows (through SFU or otherwise), then it should work with CXO. But chances are MS Office is only designed to work collaboratively over Active Directory. Therefore Codeweavers is right in ignoring your bug reports.
“Unfortunately, for an large office environment where we work extensively with other companies that use MS Office, OpenOffice 2.0 isn’t much better. Mainly because of its still shaky importers. On its own, nice app. As an MS Office standin where formatting is important, not acceptable either.”
OpenOffice-1.1.x was pretty good at importing providing you had comparable fonts installed. OpenOffice-2.0 is significantly better. It will always be possible to create a MS document that won’t import correctly into OOo, especially using proprietary fonts. There is very little they can do besides spearhead a movement to standardize the industry on a completely open format.
“I encourage that develepment.”
How so? By laughing out loud at the developers and challenging their ability “to realize that features and apps are nice”?
“Please, people, don’t say Evolution.”
Evolution.
“Since it has been open sourced it has not improved at all.”
I see feature improvements listed for exchange for all releases of evolution since 2.0.
“Visio. Make it simple, pretty and again it needs good import export filters. Making this 100% compatible with the real visio is probably a lot less important than with Word but the app needs to exist.”
Check out Kivio from KOffice.
“I think it is amazing that these guys have been so close for so long and yet can’t figure out that they are so close and fix the things that block widespread adoption.”
When you get close to perfection, it actually gets more difficult to improve. Particularly with reverse engineering closed APIs and file formats, getting most of the way there is relatively easy compared to achieving nearly perfect interoperability. I would argue that it just isn’t possible. I find it amazing that you can’t figure out that it’s your company’s reliance on Microsoft’s closed technologies for so long that has blocked it widespread adoption of software that has been so close.
I only use Wine for Lotus Notes (need to use that POS for work). It actually works quite well. The intergrated IM client doesn’t work, so I use the Meanwhile (Sametime) plugin with GAIM, but I got it to open links in Firefox. Once in a while (once a month maybe) after I paste something into an email, Wine will suddenly think that I have the ALT key held down for some reason, but mashing various combinations of ALT, CTRL, and Shift seems to fix the problem most of the time.
LSB and ODF are both becoming ISO standards. Wine and OOo import filters will always be so close to Win32 and DOC/XLS/PPT/ETC and yet never make you and your company happy.
Troll alert,
I have seen this guy’s bullshit regurgitated time and again for years. Don’t believe a word of it. He never used evolution o or openoffice.
It’s a good old fashioned FUD attempt.
Funny. You are spreading FUD about *me*. Really, do you actually believe it is even possible to write such a post without having used both extensively? Most of my other posts are regarding very specific details of gnome. Again, it is idiotic to suggest I’m just making this stuff up. If you don’t agree with me, fine. Debate me. But please don’t make up blatant lies just to shut me up. that makes you sound like George W Bush (evil liar). you don’t want that do you?
What linux fails to complete the desktop journey is a complete accounting (quickbooks, peachtree) and a vector graphics (coreldraw, illustrator) application, IMHO. It can really help people migrating to linux if CXO starts *solid* support on these apps.
Agreed; and that is not just on the home desktop, but the corporate one as well; as I said in a Solaris thread, all very nice having a wonderful operating system and hardware, but bloody useless if it can’t run the applications a company needs to run their business.
What I’d like to actually see is more co-operation between the vendors and wine; at the very least outlining the api calls they rely on and any possible nasty hacks they used to work around things that are buggy in the win32 API.
“What linux fails to complete the desktop journey is a complete accounting (quickbooks, peachtree)…”
GNUCash is approaching mediocrity, and the next release will be GTK2 and not so ugly anymore. It’s no Quickbooks, but it’s something.
“…and a vector graphics (coreldraw, illustrator) application, IMHO.”
Inkscape and Karbon are both decent and developing rapidly.
“Is it listed on the “known issues” page??? No of course not, and neither is the issue with file locking.”
Well you answered your own point didn’t you with “When I posted asking why it wasn’t fixed they told me to file a bug with the fs developers. I laughed out loud (really lol) at that and told them *they* should get it fixed, not me.”
If there is no bug logged, then there is no bug. Stop being lazy and report it !!!!! They weren’t asking you to fix it, just log it.
Alt-tab and bad file locking over network file systems is a known limitation of cxoffice. Just because it is caused by someone else doesn’t make it any less of a limitation. In fact, these things are both bigger limitations than any of the items they have listed on their “known limitations” page. What a joke!
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