JDPFu.com 2025

Last year, the owner of CodeWeavers, a commercial Windows Interface Layer for Linux called CrossOver-Office, was forced to backup his President Bush hate speak with a fairly large software giveaway. I don’t recall the exact bet he made, but something like I’ll give my products away if any of these 3 things happen. One of them was related to the price of gasoline. At least one of them did happen and he manned up and gave away his products for a few days or weeks. WINE is the free version of this product, just a few months or years behind on compatibility.

Anyone could get a copy, installed it on their Linux machine and use it with support for a year. I did this things, but only used it a little. Perhaps … er … twice. I never used them again. I don’t recall why I didn’t use them more now. Perhaps it was that if every windows program didn’t work or didn’t work perfectly under CrossOver Office, so I still needed to keep a Windows VM anyway. Regardless, it never crossed my mind to use CO.

This morning, an email arrived with a reminder that support was ending in about a week. I should renew my support, if I want the new versions that are coming out soon. I suppose I should go down load the current versions (it has been a year after all) and install them and see if the improvements help with the Windows programs that I use and would like to use under Linux. Those are:

• Quicken 2009
• Investors Toolkit
• MS-Office 2007
• MS-Visio 2007
• then I have a bunch of Windows-only computer secure tools and network scanning tools.

If you work in a structured environment with very specific tools that don’t change very often, you could and should install these tools to validate how well they work. There’s a real savings in using them across an enterprise. but note that patching may not be possible.

I’ll need a Windows VM for the other tools, so I probably won’t remember to use CO. Further, since there is no way to portable install MS-Office, it is a hassle to install it under multiple instances and it could be in violation of the license agreement. I do own an MS-Office 2003 license and work provides an MS-Office 2007 license, so being legal isn’t a problem, provided I don’t install the same version in both places. Sadly, we’ve standardized on 2007 and 2003 won’t read the new file formats. OpenOffice, which runs ever where, does a fairly good job with all the new formats, provided you aren’t collaborating and constantly going back and forth with others. It really would be easier to standardize on OpenOffice. Seriously.

A few links:

• http://www.openoffice.org/
• http://www.codeweavers.com/
• http://www.winehq.org/

If you got in on the deal a year ago, check your email for the 50% coupon code.