CodeWeavers' flagship product, Crossover Office, is based on the Wine project, but incorporates substantial changes to make installation of Windows programs a piece of cake. CrossOver Office version 5.0 was released at the end of October, and offers support for several versions of Microsoft Office -- including Office 2003 -- Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Quicken, and a host of other Windows software.

CrossOver Games is a commercial variant of Wine released by CodeWeavers with support for many of today's most popular games. CrossOver Games is tested for performance and stability with many games such as Guild Wars, Eve Online, and Steam games like Half-Life 2 and Portal.

CodeWeavers' CrossOver Linux is a software framework that emulates the Microsoft Windows 98 and 2000 application programming interfaces (APIs) on GNU/Linux. This allows Windows programs to run on GNU/Linux without having to run a virtual instance of the operating system ala a virtual machine like Win4Lin or VMware. It was originally designed to bring Microsoft Office and Intuit Quicken to GNU/Linux, but many more programs have been tested and are known to work with CrossOver to some degree.

Now what is CrossOver Office? CrossOver Office is a special, commercial, version of WINE developed by CodeWeavers. It is tuned to run some widely used office applications, like the largest part of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), Adobe Photoshop and Intuit Quicken. A complete list of officially supported applications can be found on the CodeWeavers site. Supported applications get a medal, indicating how well they work. Applications with a gold medal should work as well as they do under Windows, silver applications might have some significant bugs, but should be usable, bronze applications install and run, but might have severe bugs. Because WINE implements many important parts of the Windows API, CrossOver Office does not need Microsoft Windows.

CodeWeavers has incorporated the Wine Project's code into a product called CrossOver Office. The real beauty lies in CrossOver Office's simplicity. All a user has to do is run a simple install script that creates the necessary environment to install MS Office and Outlook. Best of all, the CrossOver Office product costs a reasonable $54.95 US and is downloadable from the CodeWeaver's web site, as is the free 30-day trial product.

One of the more common questions experienced Linux users get asked by those considering migrating from Windows to Linux is, "Will my Windows applications run under Linux?" Thanks to the folks at CodeWeavers, the answer to that is yes--for some applications, anyway. The company's CrossOver Office lets you run many important Windows applications such as various versions of MS Office, Internet Explorer, and Quicken.

CrossOver is a plug-in designed to bring native QuickTime and Shockwave Director functionality to the Linux platform. When properly installed, the product's developers claim that Linux users can play QuickTime movies and experience the same performance that Windows and Mac users currently enjoy.

CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office (CXO for short) is a software framework that emulates the Microsoft Windows 98 and 2000 application programming interfaces (APIs) on GNU/Linux. This allows Windows programs to run on GNU/Linux without having to run a virtual instance of the operating system ala a virtual machine like Win4Lin or VMware. It was originally designed to bring Microsoft Office and Intuit Quicken to GNU/Linux, but many more programs have been tested and are known to work with CXO to some degree.

Most potential customers will probably find themselves in the same boat I'm in: there are a few Windows programs that you'd like to have, but not all of them work properly with CrossOver Office yet. The product's license agreement allows CrossOver Office customers to get free upgrades for six months. Looking back at the frequency of CrossOver Office releases, this could mean two or three free upgrades before another license must be purchased. Having a few free upgrades gives us hope that the programs we want will soon be supported -- or at least work well enough to use.

...Codeweavers, Inc. took serious note of Quicken's popularity as well, and was apparently convinced of it since they have now added support for Quicken in the latest release of CrossOver Office 1.2.0.

Installing the Plugin utility is only the first step to viewing Windows content in your Linux browser. The Plugins have to be installed separately and take an inordinate amount of time. First you have to download an individual installer from Codeweaver for each Plugin, which consists of around 500k of code. After running, the installer picks up the application from either Codeweaver’s site or the application's download page and starts to install the appropriate windows executable.

CrossOver Office is not an emulator per se; neither is it a virtual machine. Instead it provides Windows application programming interfaces (APIs). A program will use APIs to do less work and achieve better performance, but relying on them too heavily makes it hard to port those applications to other platforms. Most Windows programs need a certain number of APIs in order to install and operate, and CrossOver Office provides more than 90 percent of the most common APIs along with some special ones that specific popular programs require. So it doesn't mimic Windows by translating processor instructions; all it does is provide the necessary abstraction layer that a program needs to communicate with the operating system. As a result of this approach, performance in CrossOver Office applications is usually very good compared with a virtual machine or emulator.

CrossOver Office is an excellent program based on the Wine project. This program optimizes Wine and allows users to easily run Windows programs on a Linux/UNIX environment. CrossOver Office handles many popular Windows programs such as Microsoft Office, but it also allows for the advanced user to attempt installs of programs that are not officially supported by CrossOver Office.

After I and other colleagues had wasted much time trying to configure and re-configure Windows, I finally decided that I would try installing our new copy of SuSE 9.0 on this machine. We had bought SuSE 9.0 for a new server installation. I had not originally contemplated installing Linux on my colleague's desktop workstation because (1) he is a biologist who had never used (and possibly not even heard of) Linux or any *nix-based operating system before, and (2) he needed access to genetics programs like Sequencher (used for sequence analysis) which were Windows-only and might not work under Wine/CrossOver Office. But we agreed that having a computer that worked --regardless of operating system-- would be much better than one that did not work!

I was sold enough that I was willing to go to the Codeweavers site, put my money down and purchase a copy. I actually bought my version of CrossOver Office in the downloadable format. In this format, you don't get a nice CD, but you do save $10.00. I know you want to talk dollars and cents, but we'll get to niggly details like money later. Right now, I want to tell you about my experiences with CrossOver Office.

"CodeWeavers' CrossOver Plugin allows Linux users to use software and browser plugins that where once only available on Windows. Version 1.0 was released in late August 2001 to much media fervor, while the release of version 1.1 arrived without much fanfare. Despite the lack of attention by the news media, the new version of CrossOver is a more exciting release than the original. The reason? Microsoft Media Player Support."

"CodeWeavers, a heavy supporter of the WINE (a Windows emulator for Unix systems, www.winehq.org) has just released CrossOver Office 1.0.0, a program that has the fantastic ability to allow us to install and run Microsoft Office (and Lotus Notes) applications on our Linux boxes--caveat being that right now only Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook 97 and 2000 are supported, plus Lotus Notes 5. Tired of paying for all those Windows desktop operating system licenses plus the software licenses? You just might want to look into this little beauty."