A First Look at CodeWeaver's CrossOver Office 3.0

This was my first experience with CrossOver Office of any version, and I was not disappointed. The people at CodeWeavers and at the Wine project really know what they are doing, and have combined to produce a very useful program. Easily worth the measly forty bucks they charge for it, CrossOver Office provides an easy way for regular users to easily install and use many Windows products on Linux.

CrossOver Office is an excellent program based on the Wine project. This program optimizes Wine and allows users to easily run Windows programs on a Linux/UNIX environment. CrossOver Office handles many popular Windows programs such as Microsoft Office, but it also allows for the advanced user to attempt installs of programs that are not officially supported by CrossOver Office.

Wine is an Open Source implimentation of the Windows API running atop the GNU/Linux environment. There is no emulation involved with this process, allowing the Windows programs to run at regular speeds regardless of the fact that they are not on their native environment. The fact that Wine is not an emulator also means that it is completely legal and not infringing on Microsoft's copyrights. Wine is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

When I first got CrossOver Office from Mad Penguin for review, I was thrilled. This was a piece of software that I had heard much about, but never had a chance to experience first hand. A big round of applause to CodeWeavers for giving us a copy to evaluate.

The install of CrossOver Office was simplistic. Everything went right. I accepted the default configuration options for almost every part of the surprisingly short installation, and it just worked. Kudos to CodeWeavers.

The way CrossOver Office lets you install programs is a bit different than I'm used to. Here, you select the product you wish to install and CrossOver Office either downloads the install files, takes them from cd, or asks you where they are (if the former two fail). On the other hand, I'm used to selecting the install files I want, and continuing from there. This may not sound very different, but there is one key difference, which is why (I believe) CodeWeavers chose to do it this way: With a list of products to install, the regular user knows what products will work and what he/she can install. The other way, users may install unsupported software, and encounter errors. CrossOver Office does, of course, allow advanced users to install unsupported software, but the important part is that they have made the process easy to use without sacrificing usability.

I installed a few simple applications, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player, which all downloaded and installed without problems. After that, I decided to move onwards to some larger programs. I installed Office XP, Counter-Strike, and Knight Online. Both Counter-Strike and Knight Online are unsupported programs, but they both worked. Office XP worked too, but that is only to be expected; after all, Microsoft Office is CrossOver Office's flagship.

Programs installed through CrossOver Office were added to the K menu under "Windows Applications" and were easily copied to other locations as I liked. Internet Explorer, while not my browser of choice, was quite snappy and quick to load. There seemed to be no major performance problems with Counter-Strike either, though Knight Online ran fairly poorly (my video card isn't the greatest for Linux, though - an ATI Radeon 7500 LE). All the Windows programs that I installed ran flawlessly. Another huge success on the part of CodeWeavers.

Aside from keeping track of what programs were installed and allowing easy access to them, CrossOver Office also allows you to simulate a Windows reboot after installing programs that require it.

So named because it was the only problem I encountered, "The Problem" was that I could not install MSN Messenger. This is the one application that I cannot find a good Linux equivalent of, and I would have been ever grateful if it was supported. I hope to see it working in future versions of CrossOver Office, and if it does, I will be one of the first to purchase it. All my contacts are on MSN, due to me starting on Windows and failing to find a better IM platform (at least, one that is good enough to convince other people to change, too), and it is essential that I have it. Since everything else was so perfect, I'm surprised MSN wasn't supported. I'm sure there is a very good reason, of course, but I don't know what it is.

CrossOver Office is an excellent product. It is worth the price tag, and will ease the migration from Windows to Linux in any environment. I strongly suggest this product, and I'll be keeping an eye on future releases to see what CodeWeavers comes up with next.

This document was written by Preston St. Pierre and may be reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.