My results of Wine versus CrossOver Office
I promised that I'd post some results about my escapades in using Windows apps on Suse v9. But first, a few observations, all just my own personal feelings and findings. Nothing scientific at all, just backed by years of using Windows apps and a few years of Linux/Unix (Berkeley) stuff. When I rebuild my Windows laptop, I follow a general process of installing the OS, then patches, then MSIE v5.5 and its patches, then the individual apps themselves and any patches that the apps might have. I follow that general process when installing Linux as well, and it seems to work well. Now, on to the juicy stuff. One thing that I didn't really grasp is that the installation of Suse v9 automatically select the Wine alpha/beta, yes I know about watching what boxes is checked. When I went to test Crosover, I first did so with Wine installed and then Wine _not_ installed - the not installed version worked better, was more stable. With Crossover installed, I took that as my initial Windows OS installation, it had MSIE v5 loaded, which I patches successfully. Then, I updated MSIE to v6 SP1, patched successfully and ran fine. But, the java VM wasn't installed and couldn't be found. So, if you need to access a web site/server that mandates the Microsoft JVM, you're SOL, even Microsoft's web site said so, I next installed MS Office 2000, all went fine and apps run so-so. A bit sluggish, but okay for the time that I have to use them. My most often used app is Outlook 2000 to connect to an MS Exchange v5.5 mail server. That's when I found my first problem - there's only one mail profile, no option to use multiple setups. The suggested workaround for this that exists in the Crossover docs didn't work, no other solutions found. I installed Visio 2000 Pro, went fine and the app runs okay. If that worked, I thought that I should be able to install CD2's icon set. It didn't work, and Crossover warned me about it beforehand, so that was good. Thus far, Crossover has worked okay for what I needed it for, but just as a tolerable setup. I can appreciate their work and efforts, I'm sure more work is going to make it better as time goes on. But, I reported these findings to Codeweavers, no reply and no offers to help. I guess being a demo install doesn't equate me to an interested party trying to help, so they must not think me worthy of feedback. Whatever. As it stands, I'm running on more and more of Linux apps as time progresses and less dependence on MS. I'm basically just diving deeeeper and deeeeeeeeper as the days go on, today I made thru 6 hours before having to revert to my Windows 2000 hard disk. An hour ago, I found out why - I had to have interoperability with my text files between Linux and MSDOS/Windows text files. My creations in KWrite were afoul, KWrite wasn't creating plain text files with the CR/LF. I found out that I have to check the box (which isn't persistent between uses of KWrite) that formats the file as MSDOS format with regards to CR/LF. These are just a few things that means that, in my illustrious opinion, Suse v9 is easily up to task to handle any task that I can think of for this network engineer, but the interoperability between StarOffice/OpenOffice and MS Office is just not quite ready for prime time. Close, but far enough off to cause some folks to wait. I'm going to keep at it in hopes of making more inroads. All in all, 2004 should be a fun year to watch. If anyone has questions, I'll gladly go into details later. FWIW -Jeff
On Mon, 2004-01-26 at 22:13, Jeff Bankston wrote:
I promised that I'd post some results about my escapades in using Windows apps on Suse v9. <snip> But, the java VM wasn't installed and couldn't be found.
Jeff, If you Google for msjava86.exe, this will install a Java runtime under CrossOver Office, and then IE will run Java just fine. Mark -- ______________________________________________________________ L. Mark Stone President Reliable Networks of Maine, LLC 477 Congress Street, 5th Floor Portland, ME 04107 Tel: (207) 772-5678 Cell: (917) 597-2057 Email: LMStone@RNoME.com Web: http://www.RNoME.com
Jeff Bankston wrote:
I promised that I'd post some results about my escapades in using Windows apps on Suse v9.
But first, a few observations, all just my own personal feelings and findings. Nothing scientific at all... [snip]
Thank you Jeff, most informative as I was wondering how WINE and CrossOver stacked up against one another. Anyone care to do a three 'emulator' on WINE, CrossOver and VmWare? -- The Little Helper ======================================================================== Hylton Conacher - Licenced ex-Windows user (apart from Quicken) Registered Linux user # 229959 at http://counter.li.org Using SuSE 9.0 with KDE 3.1 ========================================================================
On Wednesday 28 January 2004 21:34, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
Anyone care to do a three 'emulator' on WINE, CrossOver and VmWare?
Two apples and an orange. Vmware works perfectly, if you get it installed correctly you can run ANY windows porgram on it (with the possible exception of another copy ov vmware inside of vmware). But its a whole different thing than either Wine or Crossover. Crossover is the bigger smarter brother of Wine, they share much of the same code base. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen
On Thu, 2004-01-29 at 23:59, John Andersen wrote:
On Wednesday 28 January 2004 21:34, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
Anyone care to do a three 'emulator' on WINE, CrossOver and VmWare?
Two apples and an orange.
Vmware works perfectly, if you get it installed correctly you can run ANY windows porgram on it (with the possible exception of another copy ov vmware inside of vmware).
But its a whole different thing than either Wine or Crossover. Crossover is the bigger smarter brother of Wine, they share much of the same code base.
I've noticed getting Vmware, IMHO, is harder to get setup than the 2 minutes it takes to get COO setup. At the same time, COO costs $40. COO has Dreamweaver MX working now which makes me a happy camper. Tom PS - I never really got VMW working right...then again...I'm an idiot. -- Tom Nielsen Neuro Logic Systems 805.389.5435 x18 www.neuro-logic.com
On Friday 30 January 2004 17.09, Tom Nielsen wrote:
I've noticed getting Vmware, IMHO, is harder to get setup than the 2 minutes it takes to get COO setup. At the same time, COO costs $40.
The only trouble with vmware is that you need to get the kernel modules installed. Especially on suse 9.0 that seems to be a big problem, since some patch suse has introduced in the kernel seems to break the default vmware modules. This recipe works for me though run vmware-config.pl Install the kernel-source package that corresponds to your kernel cd /usr/src/linux make mrproper make cloneconfig make dep install km_vmware.rpm cd /usr/src/kernel-modules/vmware make -f Makefile.module su to root make -f Makefile.module install /etc/init.d/vmware stop check that all vmware modules have been unloaded (possibly reboot, if they won't unload) /etc/init.d/vmware start run vmware It won't run all windows programs, the ones with high demands on graphics like Ghost Recon and things have barfed for me, but it's good enough for most things.
On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 08:20, Anders Johansson wrote:
It won't run all windows programs, the ones with high demands on graphics like Ghost Recon and things have barfed for me, but it's good enough for most things.
Well, I was going to try it again, but you just took the wind out of my sails. If I can't get Ghost Recon or the other Rainbow Six games working then it's not worth me (or you...after you help me fix my screw ups) going through the trouble. I've got all the windows apps I need working under Crossover Office. Thanks for that little tid bit -- Tom Nielsen Neuro Logic Systems 805.389.5435 x18 www.neuro-logic.com
On Friday 30 January 2004 16:09, Tom Nielsen wrote:
I've noticed getting Vmware, IMHO, is harder to get setup than the 2 minutes it takes to get COO setup. At the same time, COO costs $40. From the VMware freshmeat page: It provides a virtual computer within Linux which can boot whichever OS you decide to put on the filesystem image that is used as a harddrive.
From the wine Freshmeat page: Wine Is Not an Emulator. It is an alternative implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs. So the two are very different - VMware deals with hardware, whereas wine is more to do with software compatability. VMware would appear to be a more complex product which would explain why it is harder to setup. I am using it with no problems though - I use it as a sandbox for testing OSs and also for those little things that I don't have the time to get Wine to run - I find wine to be quite picky :g:
PS - I never really got VMW working right...then again...I'm an idiot. We're all idiots when it comes down to it :g:. When you say you never got it working "right", what particular bit is it that you couldn't get to work right?
On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 08:59, The Purple Tiger wrote:
PS - I never really got VMW working right...then again...I'm an idiot. We're all idiots when it comes down to it :g:. When you say you never got it working "right", what particular bit is it that you couldn't get to work right?
It was about 6 months ago, so I can't remember what went wrong. Maybe I'll give it another shot. Tom -- Tom Nielsen Neuro Logic Systems 805.389.5435 x18 www.neuro-logic.com
participants (7)
-
Anders Johansson
-
Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC)
-
Jeff Bankston
-
John Andersen
-
L. Mark Stone
-
The Purple Tiger
-
Tom Nielsen