Ben Kevan’s Blog

Installing Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer on Linux (openSUSE) with CrossOver

In light of my download of CrossOver I thought I’d go over a quick overview of installing IE and Office on openSUSE.

I am assuming that you’ve already purchsed, registered and downloaded 9the rpm version) crossover-pro from CodeWeavers.com so here we go:

Open up a terminal / console / xterm and:

sudo zypper install /location/of/codeweaver.rpm
or
sudo rpm -ivh /location/of/codeweaver.rpm

The installation of codeweaver crossover pro is now completed (simple enough)

Now lets go on ahead and install Microsoft Office and IE (You must have a legal copy of MS Office to run the application on your Linux box).

To do this run:

sh -c “/opt/cxoffice/bin/cxinstallwizard”

That will bring up a window like so:

In the menu chose Internet Explorer (or Office, which ever you are going to install).

If choosing office, you can choose to install from the CD-ROM or from the installer file. To change to the installer file choose the option:

Other installer file:

and just browse to the location of the setup.exe

Now it’s just like a regular installation of Microsoft Office.

If installing IE it’s even easier, it asks a few simple steps and you’re done.

Sorry this walk through is quite choppy, i’ll probably fix it up later and beautify it, but it’s halloween and many other festives to enjoy.

Tags: codeweavers, emulation, wine

CrossOver by CodeWeavers and why I might drop native wine

I think the “lame duck” free CrossOver office day will do much better then bad for CodeWeavers. I will honestly have to say after a year I’ll re-evaluate wine / codeweaver progression and if codeweaver still outperforms wine as it does now, then I’ll cough up the few bucks and subscribe for another year (not to mention I am sure they’ll have another Major release around December to try to get the people that are “on the edge” after the lame duck download.

Ok.. so today I got my email with my registration code and went ahead and download and installed it. I then installed Office / IE6 (which I previously had run in Wine) and i’d be damned. The performance was way better, wineserver wouldn’t hang on occassion (this is a problem I had with wine running IE6), some little issues that wine had with ie6 (the look of the address bar etc) aren’t in codeweavers cross over office, Microsoft Word / Excel work faster, and better not to mention the 2007 Compatability pack was simple to install.

So props to the codeweaver developers, the wine developers (since this is really what it’s based off of), and the lame duck free day (again, a damn great ploy as they will at least get another 50 - 100 customers I am sure).

This is a great movement that I think will show that opensource companies can actually make a profit.

Tags: codeweavers, emulation, wine