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<title>First Impressions of Crossover Office LG #113</title>
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<h1>First Impressions of Crossover Office</h1>
<p id="by"><b>By <A HREF="../authors/youngman.html">Neil Youngman</A></b></p>
<p>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>I guess most Linux Gazette readers will have heard of <a href=
"http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/">Crossover
Office</a>, even if you haven't tried it. For those of you who
don't know about Crossover Office, it is a package that allows you
to run some Windows applications on Linux. It contains proprietary
software, plus a version of the free package WINE.</p>
<p>Crossover Office supports a number of popular Windows programs,
including various versions of Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and
Dreamweaver.</p>
<p>How many people out there won't use Linux because their favorite
package isn't supported on Linux? If Crossover Office supports that
package it could be the answer for those people.</p>
<p>I use Linux for my everyday computing tasks, but when working on
Word documents for my employer I found that none of the major Linux
word processors had sufficient compatibility with MS Word, so I
wanted to see if Crossover Office would allow me to run Word at
Home without having to reboot into Windows.</p>
<h3>Installing Crossover Office</h3>
<p>I started with a demo version of Crossover Office downloaded
from the <a href=
"http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/">Codeweavers web
site</a>. This is installed by running a shell archive; it installs
quickly and easily and offers a slick interface.</p>
<p>I was then able to install Office 2000 and IE6 without much
difficulty. I did find that when Crossover Office says "if you are
certain that the installation is finished, click the Installation
Complete button", the Installation Complete button should be left
well alone. Crossover Office will detect when the installer exits
and clicking that button trashed my installation. I was only able
to complete the installation by removing the .cxoffice directory
and starting again from scratch.</p>
<img src="misc/youngman/DontTouch.png">
<p>Supported applications are installed from the setup menu and
when I first tried the demo everything installed smoothly, although
later I found installation could be tricky.</p>
<h3>Installing Office 2000</h3>
<p>To install a supported application like Office 2000, select
Crossover->Office Setup from the main menu. This produces the
Crossover Office setup window, in which you click the install
button.</p>
<img src="misc/youngman/SetupWindow.png">
<p>Clicking the install button pops up the install window, which
offers a list of supported applications, from which I selected
Office 2000.</p>
<img src="misc/youngman/InstallMenuO2K.png">
<p>After selecting Office 2000, you are offered a choice of
installation media. I chose to install from CDROM, after which
Crossover Office installed DCOM95, then launched the regular Office
2000 installer. I then went through a regular Office 2000
installation, which was little different from a regular
installation on Windows. The main difference was that where Windows
would have rebooted the system, Crossover Office popped up a window
with the message "Simulating Windows reboot".</p>
<img src="misc/youngman/SimulateReboot.png">
<p>Once Office had installed, I was able to run all the usual office
applications as well as the main applications I had installed - MS
Photo Editor, which ran well under Crossover Office.</p>
<p>Crossover office added a "Windows Applications" option to my
main menu from which I could select the required program or a "new
office document" or "open office document" option. It also set up
the appropriate MIME types, so that I could open MS Office
documents just by clicking on them in Konqueror. I was also able to
open attachments in kmail using MS Office.</p>
<p>I found that the performance of Office 2000 was pretty good on
my 700MHz Athlon. I haven't actually measured it, but subjectively
Word 2000 seems to start much quicker than OpenOffice Writer and
there are no obvious delays once it is up and running.</p>
<h3>Installing unsupported software</h3>
<p>Having been impressed with the installation of MS Office, I was
curious about how well Crossover Office would do with unsupported
software.</p>
<p>WordPerfect Office 2000 took a long time to even to get to a
splash screen. I thought it was having trouble reading the CD and
the cancel button was grayed out, which may have been just as well.
Similarly when I selected WPO2000 setup the setup wizard took about
10 minutes to initialize and when it finally arrived it looked a
little scrambled, with text hidden behind graphics. Transitions
between the screens where the installation setting were selected
were slow, with the old screen being slightly scrambled before the
next screen was displayed. These screens also suffered from hidden
text, making the ability to guess what the prompts said
essential.</p>
<img src="misc/youngman/wpoinstall.png">
<p>After about 50 minutes spent on the installation, the final
result was that after a simulated reboot Crossover Office produced
the message "An error appears to have occurred during the
installation" and the install was terminated without
completing.</p>
<p>After I got the upgrade to version 4.1 I tried again. Version
4.1 was quicker, but still produced substantially similar
results.</p>
<p>The next thing I tried to install was Pagis Pro. This was a lot
quicker than the WordPerfect installation, but there were still
times when I had to wait several minutes with was no real sign of
life before visible progress restarted. At one point there was a
window which obviously required some input, but was too small to
read and I couldn't expand it. This held things up for a while
until I selected the window and pressed enter after which the
install proceeded again.</p>
<p>Other annoyances included a registration screen with no visible
submit or cancel button and a splash screen which forced itself to
the front over all the Linux stuff. This was an excessive degree of
compatibility which made some other things unusable until I got
past the splash screen.</p>
<p>The install finished with Crossover Office displaying the
message "The Unsupported software installer has exited." I could
now run Pagis Pro, but it offered me an empty list of scanners, so
it was off to the Xerox web site where I downloaded the Twain
driver for my scanner. Although the driver seemed to install OK
Pagis Pro still offered an empty list of scanners, so there was no
way of making use of it.</p>
<p>When I tried to uninstall WordPerfect Office I got a message
saying that the Corel uninstaller had found no Corel Applications
on the system.</p>
<p>It seems that Crossover Office is unlikely to help with
unsupported hardware and unsupported software will be at best hit
and miss. If you want to use Crossover Office with unsupported
software I would recommend trying it with the demo version before
parting with your cash.</p>
<h3>Support</h3>
<p>I started out with the demo version of Crossover Office 4.0 and
I was sufficiently impressed to buy version 4.1.</p>
<p>When upgrading from the demo, the <a href=
"http://www.codeweavers.com/support/docs/crossover-standard/troubleshooting#UPGRADE-DEMO">
FAQ recommends</a> uninstalling everything, so I did that. I then
installed 4.1 from a .deb package as root to make Crossover Office
generally available. On reinstalling MS Office, I found that
although I could open an Office document by clicking on it in
Konqueror the Windows Applications menu entry did not appear, so I
could not just start an Office application from the menu. I opened
<a href=
"http://www.codeweavers.com/support/tickets/browse/?ticket_id=47427">
a support ticket</a> on the Codeweavers web site on the 9th of
January. The first response was on the 21st of January and the
problem was not resolved until 15th February, when they suggested
reinstalling from scratch.</p>
<p>Subsequently, when playing with an installation in a spare
partition, I found that nothing would install, with error messages
indicating that DCOM95 had failed to install.</p>
<img src="misc/youngman/DcomError.png">
<p>Instead of opening a support ticket I chose to ask for help on
the IRC channel at irc://irc.freenode.net/#crossover. They
suggested installing DCOM95 separately, instead of starting with MS
Office. This did not work on the first couple of attempts, but
eventually it succeeded after I deleted a local copy of the DCOM95
installer program. I was then able to install Office.</p>
<h3>Conclusions</h3>
<p>Although I have had a number of unexplained errors when
installing Office 2000 and Internet Explorer, they have run
flawlessly under Crossover Office once installed.</p>
<p>Office 97, 2000 and XP are supported, but Office 2003 will not
be supported until Crossover Office 5 is released.
The support I received with Crossover Office Standard was not
responsive enough for a professional environment, but Crossover Office
Professional version comes with enhanced support.
<p>Crossover Office Professional also comes with multiuser support, which
would be essential to minimize administrative work on any multiuser
machine.</p>
<p>Overall, I found that Microsoft Office 2000 and Internet Explorer
6 worked very well under Crossover Office 4. I would not claim that
I have tested more than a fraction of the features of MS Office
under Crossover Office and I would advise more comprehensive
testing before deploying it an a professional environment.</p>
<p>If you wish to run a supported application under Crossover Office, I
consider it to be a good value at $40 for Crossover Office Standard and $75
for Crossover Office Professional.</p>
<p>If you wish to run an unsupported application, or on an
unsupported distribution, I would recommend downloading the demo
version and testing it thoroughly before parting with any cash.</p>
</p>
<!-- *** BEGIN author bio *** -->
<P>
<P>
<!-- *** BEGIN bio *** -->
<hr>
<p>
<img align="left" alt="[BIO]" src="../gx/authors/youngman.jpg" class="bio">
<em>
<p> Neil is a programmer, specialising in C++ on Unix and Linux. He has degrees
in Computer science and Next Generation Computing.
<p> Neil has worked on a wide range of systems from the control system for the
British Gas national grid to video servers for the Home Choice video on
demand service. He first programmed computers in 1980 with his school
General Studies class, which was allowed access to a mainframe at The
National Institute of Oceanography, programmed in Fortran on punch cards.
<p> A computer science degree followed at Queen Mary College, London, then Neil
worked for Logica for 3 years before taking an MSc in New Generation
Computing at Exeter University.
<p> The next 5 years saw Neil researching parallel simulation algorithms at the
Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, initially on transputers and
subsequently on SPARC based parallel systems. Since leaving RSRE, Neil has
mostly worked freelance and has worked on financial data feeds, video
servers and virus scanning proxies.
<p> Neil first used Unix at college in 1982 and started working on Linux in
1996.
<p> As of May 2004, Neil is working for Wirefast a global messaging company.
<p> Outside of computing, Neil is into motor sport, particularly Formula 1, the
World Rally Championship and the British Touring Car Championship. He
doesn't race himself. If you've seen Neil's driving, you'll understand why.
</em>
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<p>
Copyright © 2005, Neil Youngman. Released under the <a
href="http://linuxgazette.net/copying.html">Open Publication license</a>
unless otherwise noted in the body of the article. Linux Gazette is not
produced, sponsored, or endorsed by its prior host, SSC, Inc.
</p>
<p>
Published in Issue 113 of Linux Gazette, April 2005
</p>
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