CrossOver Mac Beta 1

GregN

I’ve been playing with the beta released yesterday. Some first impressions:

  • It works. I installed MS Project 2003, ran it, printed to a printer defined in the OS X print system, and saved a file to my home directory, all without too much effort.
  • Not very enterprise/multiuser friendly out of the box – lots of stuff gets installed by default in your home dir; specifically ~/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/. There seems to be an ability to “publish” a “bottle” (VirtualMachine-equivilent) so that all users of a Mac can access it — making a copy of the bottle in Library/Application Support/CrossOver/, but I had trouble making it work across users. CrossOver wanted to crash a lot in this scenario. Even when it did work, the drive mapping/folder redirection still wanted to access the original user’s home dir. I’m sure all of this can be overcome with proper config, but the configuration tools are immature.
  • I initially had some trouble running CrossOver the first time because I had some third-party Tcl libraries installed in /Library/Tcl; once those were removed, CrossOver ran.
  • The Windows, uh, windows run inside a X11 window manager – as a side-effect, this means that if you have a multiple monitor setup, any window that wants to open in the center of the screen will likely end up split half on one monitor and half on another.
  • The X11-based windows look pretty good, though, and toolbars look right, without the X11 ‘wrapper’ around them.
  • I noted some oddities when moving and resizing windows – where the window would suddenly jump away from the cursor.
  • You don’t get the Windows “resize-from-any-side” behavior; you have to use the resize widget in the lower right corner.

If they get this right, this could work very well in my environment: I could package up a Windows app via CrossOver and use my existing tools (radmind) to push it out to an Intel Mac. It’s unlikely that I’d be able to do the same with Parallels or VMware, with their disk images. For a Mac user that needs access to just one or two Windows apps (like MS Project or Visio), this might be nearly ideal.

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CrossOver Mac Beta 1

2 thoughts on “CrossOver Mac Beta 1”

  1. Patrick says:

    I have gotten this to install office 2003. One of the problems i am having to doing the Office updates, as you need IE (I also have IE 6 installed) to do automatic updates. When I download the updates manualy crossover does not know were to put them.

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