2002.07_Running Microsoft Office Under Linux with Crossover Office.pdf

REVIEWS

MICROSOFT

CrossOver Office

MEETS LINUX

M icrosoft’s Office suite may not be the best

Running Microsoft

Office under Linux

is already possible

with CrossOver

Office, though as

Patricia Jung

explains, it’s still far

from perfect

in the world, but it dominates the market

to such an extent that even some Linux

users succumb to its thrall – clandestinely booting

up Windows to write letters, design presentations

or to set up spreadsheets filled with calculations.

While it would be more in keeping with the true

faith to point out alternatives, the pragmatic

approach of the Wine project – to make Windows

programs run under Linux – will benefit users who

are not concerned with ideological debates.

Debian Testing

Debian GNU/Linux ( http://www.debian.org/ ) is

the most widespread non-commercial Linux

distribution. It always comes in three variants.

The first is “stable” (currently Debian 2.2, code-

named “Potato”). This is the thoroughly tested

and stable version in which only security updates

are incorporated. Then there is “testing”, the

contender for the next stable release, which

incorporates the latest software that has

undergone initial testing (current code name

“Woody” – the future Debian 3.0). The third

version is “unstable”, the developers’ workhorse

and the main test subject, in which some

features may well not be working properly

(currently “Sid”).

The wine of the code weavers

When the company CodeWeavers, whose main

developer is Alexandre Julliard – the driving force

behind the Wine project, introduced its new

product CrossOver Office 1.0.0 at the end of

March, it caused a wave of euphoria, and not just

in the Linux-related media. CrossOver Office is

designed to enable the installation and use of

Winword and its cohorts under Linux.

However, if you take a closer look you will see

that CodeWeavers Inc. is trying to play fair with its

potential customers. They freely admit that

CrossOver Office only brings MS Word, Excel,

PowerPoint, Outlook 97 and 2000, as well as Lotus

Notes, to the Linux desktop. You will have to make

do without Outlook Express, FrontPage, Access or

Internet Explorer, and also without Clippy, the office

assistant – who is unlikely to be sorely missed. The

company also warns that non-US versions of Office

packages will not work with CrossOver Office 1.0.0.

That last statement could not be generally

verified in our test: not only were we able to install

a version of Microsoft Office 2000 SR 1 Premium

Edition without problems (apart from Outlook)

under SuSE 7.2 with KDE 3.0 or fvwm2, we could

also use it as advertised. The same was true for an

MS Word 2000 SR1 OEM version on Debian

Testing with KDE 2.2.2, and for the combination

of GNOME 1.4 (Figure 6) or fvwm2 (Figure 5) and

MS Office 97’s Winword, Excel and PowerPoint in

the SuSE installation mentioned above.

Inscrutable

During our test, the only thing that went smoothly

was the installation of CrossOver Office itself and

that of the Microsoft Office products. When it

Wine W ine I s N ot an

E mulator is an attempt

to replicate the

Windows API

( A pplication

P rogramming I nterface)

so that function calls

from native Windows

applications can be

received by Wine and

converted in such a way

that Linux and the X

server will perform the

relevant actions (for

example drawing a

window or reacting to a

mouse click).

The Installation of applications is done

smoothly, but that’s only half the story

LINUX MAGAZINE

Issue 22 • 2002

REVIEWS

Where would you like to install CrossOver and MS Office?

comes to actually using them there seems to be a

lot of luck involved. An action, such as inserting an

MS Graph 2000 diagram into a Winword 2000

document, which worked fine in one setup, caused

the entire GNOME desktop to freeze in another.

KDE proved more robust, while the test run with

fvwm2 was subjectively better overall.

Apart from anything else, much depended on

the particular version of CrossOver Office. While

the insertion of the diagram mentioned above was

no problem with the tested CD release, it caused

the downloaded version to crash completely. This

seems to point to CodeWeavers using the same

version number (1.0.0) to distribute constantly

improving versions of the software.

After countless, often futile attempts to

reproduce errors our two main pieces of advice for

potential CrossOver Office users are to have

patience (if you are too impatient waiting for an

action to finish you are at a greater risk of

everything freezing up) and be ready to do some

tidying up afterwards.

To this end CrossOver Office comes with a

program called cxoffice_reset in the bin

subdirectory of the installation directory, which,

unlike Winword and its friends, acquires an entry

in the KDE or GNOME start directory during

installation. Calling this program will restore the

functionality of your desktop if an MS Office

program freezes, so that you can try again. It is

generally a good idea to get this tool to clear any

old CrossOver processes after the end of every MS

Office session, no matter how successful it may

have been.

Excel on Linux

If you want to run .exe files under Linux, you

need to be prepared to endure a certain amount of

misery. Not only will you encounter frequent and

unpredictable waiting times and annoying crashes

(which, eerily enough, may occur even when the

application is simply left to its own devices for long

enough), but the way in which the cursor has a

tendency of flicking across the desktop in a

strange and unexpected manner does not exactly

improve usability.

Copying and pasting between different

applications (Figure 4) is a hit-and-miss affair. The

extent to which it works depends on the version of

CrossOver Office as well as that of MS Office.

Templates can sometimes be used, as long as they

don’t contain any VB scripts. Inserting pictures

works, but you have to make do without the

Microsoft clipart gallery. The macro recorder is

perfectly useable, unlike the VB and Microsoft

script editor. Printing also worked without a hitch

in our tests. In contrast, the screen display was

rather disappointing despite the built-in TrueType

fonts.

You quickly get used to the fact that the file

selection dialog refers to “drives” in true Windows

fashion (Figure 5). The /tmp EZTZhttp://www.winehq.

com/

Wine from CodeWeavers http://wine.codeweavers.

com/

What works and what doesn’t http://www.

codeweavers.com/products/office/the_real_dirt.php

Practical testing

The CrossOver Office bin directory also contains

links called excel , powerpnt , winword , outlook ,

frontpg , iexplore , notepad and msaccess

(depending on the MS Office installation). When

you call these (specifying the path if necessary) you

will be disappointed to find that only powerpnt ,

winword , notepad and excel actually work

properly. All these links point to the shell script

wine in the same directory, which works its magic

to ensure that the relevant Windows binary, from

support/dotwine/fakewindows/Program Files below

the CrossOver Office installation directory is called,

with Wine as an intermediate layer.

CrossOver Office

Supplier CodeWeavers Inc.

Web ttp://www.codeweavers.com/

For Use MS Office under Linux

Against Prone to crashes, unstable

PowerPoint running on Linux

rating

Issue 22 • 2002

LINUX MAGAZINE

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