"The Real Dirt"

October 1, 2007

At CodeWeavers, we believe strongly in truth in advertising. This section is provided to give you as honest a glimpse as we can provide about our product and what our Beta testers have found.

What's New in 6.0

1. More Steam based games run, including Team Fortress 2
2. Outlook 2003 has improved dramatically. If using an Exchange Server, you no longer need to install IE to use Outlook.

Just the Highlights:

1. Microsoft Office, Outlook, Visio, Project, Internet Explorer, Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, Photoshop (most versions), Quicken (most versions), and Notes all work well, and are getting to be rock solid.
2. World of Warcraft continues to work well. Patch version 2.2 has introduced some sound issues (and fixed sound for others). We're working to make sound work well everywhere, so check the compatibility center entry for WoW frequently.
3. iTunes 4 works, and can do everything we thought was important. However, Apple has discontinued the ability to use iTunes 4 with the iTunes store. Further, we are not yet supporting iTunes 7, so the value of iTunes in CrossOver has gone down.
4. Your mileage may vary, depending on the applications you need and the distribution you run. We have now reached the point where the number of different distributions and applications combinations are beyond our ability to completely test. There may well be bugs or flaws we're not aware of - and there may even be horrid regressions. There are also so many combinations of install and upgrade paths that we have a hard time testing them all.
5. We try to support all major Linux distributions. By and large, we succeed. We have tested the 6.0 release against many different distribution flavors and have had good success. However, we can never test every combination, and every new release of a distribution these days seems to break Wine or the way CrossOver menus work. Hence, your mileage may vary.
6. We are really paying attention to our compatibility center . Your vote there will be counted.

Tangible things you will get now for your money:

1. Software, including a fairly easy to use configuration program, that makes it possible to install and run any of the applications listed on our supported applications list. This list is getting to be quite extensive; check our list of supported applications for full details, or better yet, explore our compatibility center for full details including user comments and ratings.
2. A meaningful vote on our compatibilty center that will be respected.
3. Documentation explaining how it works and how to use it, including both a nice HTML version and a printable PDF version.

Tangible things you will get in the future for your money:

CrossOver Standard customers receive 6 months of free upgrades and level 3 support. CrossOver Professional customers receive 12 months of free upgrades and level 2 support. Large volume customers get 12 months of upgrades and level 1 support. Upon the expiration of that time period, all customers will still be able to download the most current version of the software that they received while under the support agreement, forever (or at least as long as we can practically make that possible). See our Upgrade Policy for more details and instructions on how to upgrade.

Service you will get for your money:

Level 2 and 3 customers will be able to submit problems to our Support Ticket System. A real human being will read every support issue entered, and will get back to you with suggestions and thoughts for fixes or work arounds. Level 1 customers will also receive direct phone support.

Level 3 customers will be limited to support issues that are related only to the installation of our supported applications on the distributions we test against. Beyond that, we may not be able to provide further support to Level 3 customers.

If your problem is serious (as many Wine problems are), we will triage your request. If possible, we will have a Wine developer examine your problem and come up with a solution. At the very least, we will aggregate the worst problems and make sure that they are solved in a future release of CrossOver.

We will prioritize in Level order, with Level 1 tickets taking precedence over Level 2 tickets, which are ahead of Level 3 tickets.

Much to our dismay, we are no longer able to have a Wine developer resolve each and every support request from our customers. We will have customer service people - trained in the use of CrossOver and Wine - respond to every issue. But there will be issues that they cannot solve, and that require a Wine developer. And within those tickets, there will be times when we simply cannot solve a problem in a timely fashion. We hate this, but it's true, and that's the point of this web page.

We're committed to providing community resources so that our customers can help each other. The compatibility center is a key to that, with tips and tricks, discussion forums, and much more. We also continue to host the Wine web site (www.winehq.org), so that you can always turn to the broader Wine community.

We also provide a 'Discuss' mailing list to foster direct communication between our customers and so that you can exchange tips and learn from the experience of each other.

Intangible benefit you will get for your money:

You will be helping to provide a much needed source of income to a Free Software company that has provided a large range of valuable improvements to one of the most key Free Software Projects - Wine. For a list of what we have done, please [click here].

CodeWeavers will use the revenue from the end user version of CrossOver Linux to continue its work on Wine as well as to enhance and improve our products.

What works perfectly:

CrossOver Linux should install easily. You should also be able to pick and choose any of our supported applications and easily and cleanly install them.

You should then be able to launch all of the Office apps.

Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and Notes should operate very well.

CrossOver uses client side rendering and includes Apple's patented hinting technology. This means that fonts should appear as cleanly and crisply in CrossOver as they do in Windows. Even more important, the layout of documents should be identical in CrossOver and on Windows.
Note however that client side rendering can only be used with XFree86 4.1 and higher. On older systems and when the X server does not support the Xrender extension, CrossOver will fallback to the standard server side font rendering which is less accurate.

What works well:

Most of our other supported applications should work cleanly for you. However, some of these applications have minor visual glitches, and other minor problems.

CrossOver can also ensure that the same fonts used for on screen display are also used for printing documents. This means that the document layout will be the same on paper as it was on the screen, with the same line and page breaks. This also ensures that if a document is printed with CrossOver and later with Windows, the two printed documents will be identical.

CrossOver will generally detect your printing environment (especially CUPS) and prints to nearly all printers our customers have reported. Printing is not always perfect, however.

You should be able to invoke the Windows applications from your desktop, by launching them from your environment's menus, by opening an email attachment, or by clicking on an Office document. However configuration has to be done manually in Opera and older versions of Mozilla (<=0.9.4).

What sort of works:

iTunes 4 will install and run, but you are prohibited by Apple from using it with the iTunes store, which severely constrains its usefulness. We hope to support a newer version of iTunes in a future release of CrossOver.

There are a range of other applications that some testers have reported success with. These include Act!, FrameMaker, TurboTax, Half-Life, Diablo, and many others. We don't officially support these (yet), but they may work for you.

With 6.2, the success rate with unsupported applications continues to grow -- we get an increasing number of 'it just works!' notices from our testers.

What doesn't work:

Games and applications that require copy protection support. This includes titles such as Photoshop CS2 and Dreamweaver MX 2004 and later. It also includes a fairly wide range of games. This is our priority for our next release.

The office assistant sort of works, but when it's running, things get weird and break badly. It's fun to try, but remember to turn Clippy off when you're done.

What we will make work:

We will continue to proceed on two fronts - to improve the core supported applications, as well as to bring new applications into the supported list.

In preparing our 6.0 release, as we will with all future releases, we have carefully followed the votes and input from our customers. We rely on our compatibility center to help us learn what you need. Eventually, we hope to be able to support a broad range of applications.