My Windows 7 VM -- buh bye, maybe?

[SteveRiley]

Look! Office 2010 on CrossOver! Must try very soon...

[dequire]

Probably a stupid question...but why do you need Office? (as opposed to Calligra or Libre Office)?

[SteveRiley]

For work -- need Outlook to do email, and all of our content is in Word/PowerPoint/Excel.

[dequire]

As I thought. The deaded corporate lock-in. That's awesome that Crossover is supporting 2010 though!

[SteveRiley]

I'd give it a go tomorrow, but have too much to do this week. Will wait until the weekend.

[GreyGeek]

I tried CrossOver, version 6 & 7 pro. I have version 8 pro setting in my archive but I never installed it. In my opinion, using your Win7 VM is a vastly superior solution.

There are two kinds of Windows applications: those that CrossOver supports, and the rest. Of those that they support, a list of them sorting according to the compatibility with Crossover is here: http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibi...all=0;curPos=0

They are divided into Gold, Silver and Bronze apps.

Gold rated Windows apps install and run as you'd expect them to. There are about 30 gold ones, but not all are "apps". The main one is Microsoft Office 2000. The rest are fonts.

Silver rate apps run but "have bugs" which prevent them from running "flawlessly" but they are "usable". Most of the Silver Windows apps are versions 5 to 10 years old.

Bronze apps can be installed but CodeWeaver recommends that they be used "with caution". That's corporate speak for "they don't run well or at all". The apps in this category are mainly the newer or latest versions of Windows applications.

My biggest complaint with CrossOver was that it hijacked my audio and video mimes and even when I wasn't running a Windows app, if I clicked on a URL or an mp3, for example, IE or MediaPlayer would run.

My next complaint was that IF you took the time to tweak DLLs and config settings in a single WINE BOTTLE, the next update of WINE (CodeWeaver) would break it. There was no guarantee that you could re-tweak it to work again.

CodeWeaver solved the app setting interaction problem with WINE by putting each Windows application into its own "sandbox". Otherwise, a tweak to get a game working would break MS Office.

ALL in all, in my opinion it really breaks your KDE UI. Considering how you say VMWare runs inside Kubuntu, as if the Windows applications were native and the VM is transparent, THAT solution is far superior to CrossOver.

[SteveRiley]

Well, despite my lack of copius spare time, I did give it a try today. Office 2010 installed fine, but Outlook can't connect to my Exchange server. The Codeweavers web site has a couple workarounds, neither of which worked for me. Supposedly they're working on this issue, so I'll just wait. Meanwhile, I'm back in the VM...

[GreyGeek]

How did your audio and video mimes (system settings file associations) work out?

[SteveRiley]

In Kubuntu, or in a Crossover bottle? I didn't take a look at that. I can tomorrow. When I saw that Outlook wasn't going to start without some futzing around, I had to give up. Needed to get back to work

EDIT: Duh, read your earlier post too fast, missed the sentence where you explained how Crossover modified Kubuntu's MIME types. I'll definitely look into that when I'm back on the T520 in the morning.

[SteveRiley]

How did your audio and video mimes (system settings file associations) work out?

Crossover made no changes to MIME types. So it appears the issue you observed earlier has been fixed.

[GreyGeek]

Great!
Which of the Gold applications fit your needs? Most of the Gold supported apps are versions that are over 5 to 8 years old.

[dibl]

In my opinion, using your Win7 VM is a vastly superior solution.

+1

A couple years back, I wasted an entire weekend trading messages with a Crossover developer, while testing The Master Genealogist under whatever the current version of Crossover was at the time. It appeared to work, at first, but then upon examining lower levels of functionality, there were bugs. I sunk 3 days into that trial, with an unsatisfactory result.

A VMware VM is the real OS, it just happens to be hosted on Linux. There are no compatibility issues, because the application sees the OS that it was written for. I'm not wasting any more time that way.

[SteveRiley]

Perhaps you guys are right. I was thinking that using Crossover would allow me to remove the VM, which feels like an unnecessary layer. But Crossover looks to be weaker in many respects, and given how well VMware Player integrates with the desktop, I'm thinking now I should just stick with that.

[GreyGeek]

A wise choice, IMO.

My experience with CrossOver reflects what Dibl found, except that I didn't learn as quickly as he did. I wasted far more time trying to get it to work with the Win apps I was trying to use at the time. I got Visual FoxPro 5.0 to work under CrossOver, as far as compiling. The exe would run under Windows but it had font and background color problems I couldn't resolve.

[jpenguin]

Yea, I own CX, but I only bought it because I got 50% off because I'm a student and I got an additional 10% off .because of some sale. I would pay full price for it, I don't un many apps in it; I have a Win 7 VM for that