Linux Tavern

Crossover Office endeavors to bring all of those essential windows programs to Linux without the overhead of a Virtual Machine like VMWare. It is an offshoot of the WINE project that has been tested and is a little more polished and accessible to the average user.

The following screenshot tour is of an install of Crossover Office on Ubuntu Linux. I also included screenshots of the initial install of a windows application — in this case it was iTunes. Click any of the images below to view the image full size:

Running the downloaded install file

Click the Image for the full size image

When you first run the downloaded setup file for Crossover Office, the first thing that happens is the setup files are extracted.

Beginning of the Crossover Office Setup

After extracting the files, the setup program begins and this is the welcome screen that comes up first.

Crossover Office Install Wizard Second Screen

This is the second and last screen of the install wizard where you can enter any HTTP proxy settings if needed for your network.

Believe it or not, that’s all there is to the install of Crossover Office. It’s not only a very simple and easy setup, it’s also very polished — users coming from Windows will feel right at home.

After the initial setup, you can also use the Install Wizard to automatically download and install some Windows programs. To test this out, I chose iTunes for Windows.

Installing iTunes in Crossover Office

After starting the install wizard and selecting to install iTunes, all you have to do is choose the express setup, which will download and install iTunes for Windows within your Crossover Office installation.

Crossover Office Install Wizard Downloading iTunes for Windows

Here’s a screenshot of the Crossover Office Install Wizard downloading iTunes for Windows.

After this, iTunes is ready to run under Linux — in theory. I say in theory, because I wasn’t able to get it to run. To be fair to Crossover Office, I was running it in a virtual machine through VMWare. Under a standard install of Linux, it may just run fine. I’ll soon be testing Crossover Office in a real install of Linux (not a virtual machine), and I’ll post those screenshots and my experiences if it works.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Ubuntu, Open Source, Crossover Office, iTunes

This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Linux Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.