[luau] Crossover 1.1.0 Review by Me

[Warren Togami]

Crossover 1.1.0 Review by Warren Togami

CrossOver is a neatly packaged version of Wine with a small proprietary
frontend sold as a low-cost product by CodeWeavers.  I purchased
Crossover back when it was v1.0.1.  Now with the 1.1.0 version it was a
free upgrade, but with a tremendous amount of new features.  It runs
many Windows plugins with great stability within many Linux web
browsers, additionally it supports AIM for Windows and works very well
with Adobe Acrobat Reader, two applications that do not yet have
functional equivalents in Linux.

http://www.mplug.org/archive/2002/crossover_shot1.png
Check out this super cool screenshot of my Athlon laptop running
Mandrake 8.2 beta 4 with Crossover 1.1.0 running AOL Instant Messenger,
Quicktime for Windows, Windows Media Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader
concurrently.  Windows Media Player is playing an ASF DivX encoded
episode of Stargate SG-1.  Surprisingly it seems to be able to play at
greater resolutions and performance than any Linux DivX player I've
tried.

Crossover runs the Shockwave plugin with great stability, unlike the
native Flash-only Linux plugin that crashes often on some platforms,
especially in cases of thin clients with remote window managers (some
kind of memory corruption issue that occurs very rarely with local
desktops but does occur to everyone.  I wish Macromedia would fix that
Linux native plugin.)

Notice in the screenshot that the AIM Buddy systray icon that would
normally be in the Windows systray is in the KDE systray.  Although
there are a few minor UI bugs, this level of clean integration totally
surprised me.  I am very much impressed!

I very much encourage everyone to try the free demo (below) of Crossover
1.1.0.  It has every capability of the full version except for these
annoying white rectangles that block your view often.  If you see the
value in Crossover, please buy it from Codeweavers.  Fairly cheap at
$19.95 with the promise of future updates that will continue to improve
in Windows compatibility.

I feel that Wine is finally getting good within the past year, and with
enough financial support these Wine developers may eventually free us
from the need to ever buy Windows again.  Sure many of us may dismiss
this because we ourselves don't exactly need Windows applications, but I
assert that Wine is VERY IMPORTANT toward convincing the rest of the
unconverted masses to try alternative operating systems like Linux. 
Wine is the only surefire comfortable migration path for these billion+
users, and WINELIB provides a very quick and easy way to port Windows
applications to become native Linux applications.  For example, Corel
used Wine to quickly port their Office and graphics suites to Linux.


Are you a Linux supporter?  Put your money where your mouth is!  Please
financially support the coders who constantly strive to improve software
in the name of freedom and openness.  There are many such worthy
recipients of our monetary donations, and I believe Wine developers to
be one of the most important toward the world's freedom from Microsoft
(entirely due to the "smooth migration path" argument).

Free Demo of Crossover 1.1.0
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover/download_demo.php

Read their press release here
http://www.codeweavers.com/about/press_releases/?id=20020227

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com

p.s.
I have made "donations" to the following companies and groups to
financially support Linux and open source.  Please join me!

Mandrakesoft $20 last month toward KDE development
Red Hat $60 RHN one year subscription for my home firewall
Transgaming $50 a month toward DirectX Wine development 
(These folks do lots of good work too, but they are in severe financial
trouble.  Writing an article about this next.)
CodeWeavers $19.95 twice just to thank them for their great product