Crossover

[sandwer]

Crossover for Mac

 

1. What is Crossover?

 

Crossover is a product based on wine. Wine is a set of translation technologies that allow calls to the windows API to be mapped onto an equivalent x/windows API.

The end result is that well witten windows programs can execute on xwindows.

 

2. Why is this different from Virtual PC or Parallels

 

Parallels and the like emulate the whole machine, and the copy of windows that you run inside it. So you can allocate say 256 mb of your memory to this virtual machine, and you have a copy of windows running all the time, whether you are using it or not - chewing up that RAM. Crossover uses just the resources an individual program needs to run, and executes the program inside Macos x, rather than within an emulated environment.

 

3. Which is better then?

 

This is a case of horses for courses - if you feel more comfortable with the 'complete' windows environment - being able to use notepad and paint as well as your applications, then parallels is probably better for your needs at the moment. If you just need to run, say, a few bits of MS Office - say Word and Excel, but spend the rest of your time in Aqua, then crossover is probably the one for you.

 

4. Games....

 

Don't bother, use bootcamp. Games running on either platform are for keen experimenters only. Remember what I said about translating the windows api...if a game is 'well behaved' it may work in Crossover. If not, then parallels will run it but lacks any graphics accelerations, so your experience is likely to be a poor one. So - use bootcamp to run a native windows install with all the bits you need for that perfect gaming experience....

 

5. Crossover then....

 

Heres a rough guide to some bits and pieces.

 

Installation. If you have a previous alpha version, trash it, along with the data you may have had with it - this will be located in /home/library/application support/crossover - trash the lot.

Install by following the instructions. At the time of writing, the install is one of the classic 'drag this to your applications folder' applications.

 

Start it by double clicking on the Crossover application.

 

A few things to note at this point.

 

A Bottle is a place that you can install applications into. There are three kinds of bottles - as there are three variants of windows...98, 2000 and XP. Now in my experience, very little needs to be 2000 or XP - only stuff that whines about needin a later version of windows should be put into 2000 or XP, use 98 as a default.

Remember, this isn't the version of windows that is your favourite here - it is the flavour of the windows API thats been referred to. This is an important thing to remember - conventional thinking would lead you to think that the latest version is the better version to use, when in fact, the earlier 98 API is more mature and supported by more applications.

 

Lets start by installing a copy of Office 2000, say.

 

We'll kick off by creating a bottle. Select Configure, Manage Bottles. Click the '+' button and give the bottle a name, and alter the bottle type to Win98, and click create.

It'll take up to a few minutes to create it....

 

Next up, we'll install Office 2000

Select Configure, then install software.

Select Microsoft Office 2000 from the list and click continue

It will prompt you to install into a Bottle - choose the appropriate existing bottle that you created earlier.

Insert the Windows 2000 disc

The windows 2000 cd should show up in the choose installer dialog, so we'll click on that and press continue.

The install should start - select what you want to install, supply the information as asked for and then wait. The office 2000 seems to stall at 85% or thereabouts. Just let it run its course.

Eventually, the dialogs will show that the installation completed. A finder window will be created and show the component icons in there.

 

Test this by starting Word from the Programs menu.

 

Apply this same principle to other windows programs you want to iinstall - anything on the list should work pretty flawlessly.

 

Installing unsupported software.

 

This means that you are in uncharted territory, and you have earned the 'experimenter' tag. This is where the fun starts. And please remember - its not on the list, not because its known not to work, rather, no-one has tried it yet...

 

Always create a fresh bottle to work in. You don;t want to trash your hard won installation of Office and other stuff by experimenting. Create a new bottle.

Trust me - I have burnt myself on this a few times.

 

A few techniques are available to you .

 

By default, a crossover - or wine - window will appear on your desktop as a floating resizeable window. Some programs dislike the idea of infinitely variable window resolutions and expect to see good old 800x600...

You can change the operation of the bottle by selecting programs, Run Command, select your newly created bottle and then type winecfg. This will bring up a 'windows looking' dialog. To set the screen resolution for everything that is installed in this bottle, click Graphics, and tick the 'Emulate a virtual desktop'. Set the window to the size you want and click ok.

Try installing things into this bottle - you will notice that it presents a window on the screen the size that you created.

 

* When you are running crossover, keep the Activity Monitor open. Often you can solve issues with a hang during installs by stopping the appropriate wineserver process.

 

* Remember it is a beta at the moment and that means that its not finished. There will be things you find that are wrong - please report them to codeweavers as aproper bug report, attaching the crash dump ideally.

 

* Remember that some programs are just so twisted that they will never run through wine. Anything that tries to access the hardware directly is probably a no-no.

 

* Remember that the spectre of undocumented API calls (for microsoft's internal use) still haunts windows and causes some unpredictable behaviour in wine. Just forgive it and see if there is anything you can do to feedback about the bug!

 

* Remember it is NOT bootcamp, and it is not parallels, it is a third way.

[sev7en]

Thanks for this useful thread. Here's some more info:

 

Full list of supported applications: http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/cat

 

Official FAQ: http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/faq/

 

Online Documentation: http://www.codeweavers.com/support/docs/cr...troubleshooting