The Fedora project is the testbed system for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. When new features are introduced to this platform it can tend to cause problems with the operation of CrossOver.

Fedora Core 9 has a known problem which results in periodic system hangs when running CrossOver or Wine. There will probably be fixed in a future Fedora patch -- watch the Fedora websites for updates.

On systems that support the 'NX-bit', typically AMD x86-64 or Intel EMT64 processors, you may encounter trouble running any CrossOver application.

	In that case, adding "noexec=off" to the linux kernel command line in grub will disable the hardware NoExecute protection of the CPU in Fedora Core. An example is provided below: kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-1.2139_FC5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet noexec=off

Although CrossOver has provisions to cope with the SELinux and the audit facility, these facilities are still known to sometimes cause problems, depending on how they are configured. So it is always useful to try turning them off in case of trouble. You can do that at boot time by adding:

selinux=0 audit=0

to your linux kernel command line in your grub menu.lst file.

If you encounter other issues on Fedora Core please file a support ticket.

To be candid, Gentoo is such a moving target that it is nearly impossible to support, and we do not officially support it. Nonetheless, many people use Gentoo to run CrossOver successfully. We will try to document common issues here; feel free to let us know when we should update this section.

The current problem of the month with Gentoo is that many glibc packages are built without TLS support, which is sick and wrong for a modern glibc. One customer (thanks Petra!) wrote to us and said:

	I had to change my CHOST-Variable in make.conf to something greater than "i586-pc-linux-gnu", for me namely "i686-pc-linux-gnu". I think, there are a lot of gentoo-builds out there with this variable set to ...i386..., and no tls.

In recent K12LTSP distributions, there is a configuration option that allows the system to reserve the resources per user. CrossOver must reserve an amount of virtual memory greater than is allowed by the K12LTSP configuration. If you find that none of your applications are installing or running correctly edit the file:

/etc/sysconfig/k12ltsp-limits

Look for the line:

K12LTSP_LIMITS="YES"

and replace it with:

K12LTSP_LIMITS="NO"

Depending on the install type of Mandrake versions 9.2 and 10 CrossOver may fail to install or run your Windows applications. This is due to a bug in the Mandrake 2.4 kernel builds. The solution seems to be to upgrade to one of the Mandrake 2.6 kernels or to build your own kernel.

Some users have reported problems even with the newer kernels that seem to be related to video card drivers or the Linux Standard Base support package being installed. If you still have problems after performing a kernel upgrade remove the LSB support package if it is installed or if you are running an NVidia or ATI card with vendor provided drivers try reverting back to the standard Mandrake driver.

When running CrossOver on SUSE 10.1 you may encounter a message such as "Unable to convert 'c:/' to a Unix path" or "wine: failed to initialize: /opt/cxoffice/lib/wine/ntdll.so: failed to map segment from shared object: cannot allocate memory". To correct this issue, edit the file /etc/sysconfig/ulimit and make sure that both HARDVIRTUALLIMIT and SOFTVIRTUALLIMIT are set to 0. You have to be root to do this but the advantage is that it works for all users on that machine.

The glibc library that ships with TurboLinux contains a bug that prevents CrossOver from functioning properly.

Please contact TurboLinux support or build a newer glibc package to correct this problem.

There is a bug in default Xorg configuration on certain versions of Ubuntu that can result in this error message when you try to launch CrossOver setup. The solution is to run the following commands to correct the Xorg configuration.

$ sudo ln -s /etc/X11/rgb.txt /usr/lib/X11/rgb.txt
$ sudo ln -s /etc/X11/rgb.txt /usr/X11R6/lib/rgb.txt
$ sudo ln -s /etc/X11/rgb.txt /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt

Some versions of Ubuntu ship with TLS disabled. This change was made to enable Xen, but it breaks the distribution's compatibility with CrossOver. To reenable TLS, rename the file /lib/tls.disabled to /lib/tls.

Of course, that change may break compatibility with Xen or VMware. Xen can be fixed via the installation of the libc6-xen library.

A typical symptom is that you get an 'Exception raised' popup window during the creation of a bottle, or the first time you install an application with CrossOver. It is important to fix this issue as it will cause the bottles to be left in a half-created state which in turn will cause problems later when you try to install Windows applications.

In CrossOver 6.0.0 and 6.0.1 this is usually caused by known bugs in the Linux distribution's OpenGL driver.

If you are using ATI's fglrx driver, then the workaround is to set the 'UseFastTLS' option to off. To do so, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and in the fglrx device section, add the following line and then restart X.

Option "UseFastTLS" "2"

If you are using the proprietary NVidia driver, then upgrading to version 9746 or greater should fix the problem.

If the problem persists, then please file a support ticket.

If you don't use a desktop (KDE or Gnome), you have installed an application that does not show up on your desktop's menu, or you wish to start your application from the command line you can use one of the methods below.

The easiest way to run a Wine command line is via the 'cxrun' utility. It should be available in your CrossOver menu with the name "Run a Windows command" or you can run it from the command-line, like this:

$ ~/cxoffice/bin/cxrun

If you know the name of the Windows executable you can try running it using the following command:

$ ~/cxoffice/bin/wine --cx-app appname.exe

If the application registers itself in the right way, the following may work:

$ ~/cxoffice/bin/wine start appname.exe

If you don't know the name of the application, you can search under the ~/.cxoffice/bottlename/drive_c directory for Windows executables like this:

$ find ~/.cxoffice/bottlename/drive_c -iname \*.exe

One of the great things about Linux is that there are so many different versions of Linux. However, one of the challenges that creates is that the process of installing software is a bit different on nearly every one of those, particularly for the novice user.

To try to help this, we have packaged CrossOver in a variety of formats, including a self installing 'shell script' (also known as the Loki installer). This is essentially the same thing as a Windows program which will install new software.

These instructions should help you install CrossOver:

1.) Start the download, and save the file to your hard disk.

You need to remember where the file is downloaded to, as this is different on different versions of Linux.

The file will be named something like install-crossover-standard-demo-5.0.1.sh, and it is a self installing shell script (just like a self installing program on Windows).

2.) Start the script

Once our installer script starts running, it should take over, and we feel that it is a nice friendly, point and click program that makes it easy to use CrossOver. But getting the script running can be tricky, as this also varies depending on your version of Linux.

On many versions of Linux, you can simply open a file browser and double click on our program. You may have to tell it to 'run in Terminal'.

If all else fails, you can start it via a command line. To do this, look for an icon labelled 'Terminal' or 'Console' and start it. This should give you a command prompt. You will need to use the 'cd' command to change to the directory with our installer. Try using the 'ls' (list files) command combined with 'cd' until you reach the correct directory. Then you can start it running with the following command:

$ sh install-crossover-standard-demo-6.0.0.sh

To download the CrossOver Linux Standard installer, go to our store at https://www.codeweavers.com/login.

There you can log in using the email address you used to order CrossOver. If you need your password, just click on Lost Password and you will receive your password in the mail (you can change it once logged in).

Once logged in you will see a Downloads link in the sidebar. Click on that link and then follow the instructions to download the file.

Note, to be automatically notified of new releases, subscribe to our Announce mailing list.

If you are upgrading from the demo version to the full version of CrossOver please see the next question.

You do not need to uninstall CrossOver Linux Standard before upgrading. Just download the new version of CrossOver Linux Standard as described in the previous section.

Then simply install in the same directory as your existing installation. Your Windows applications, the files you have on the c:\ 'drive' as well as your settings will all be preserved.

If for any reason you wish to reinstall from scratch, first follow the uninstallation procedure, and then proceed normally.

To unlock an installed demo, click the Register and unlock this demo icon in the CrossOver menu. If you don't have this icon, you can run the registration tool from the command-line, like this:

$ ~/cxoffice/bin/cxregister

Or, if you installed as root:

$ /opt/cxoffice/bin/cxregister

If you want to use a different version of CrossOver from the installed demo version (for instance, if you bought CrossOver Professional but installed the 'standard' demo version) you should download the full installer and install it over the top of the demo installation. The installer will upgrade the demo automatically.

When upgrading, make sure you install using the same mode (root or user) that was used when installing the demo.

Firstly, please check if you application is in the list of officially supported applications.

The CodeWeavers CrossOver Compatibility Center (C4), was created to dramatically expand the range of applications CrossOver Linux Standard supports. If you need to use an application that is not currently by CrossOver Linux Standard, check C4 first. Adding support for an application requires us to have the application to test with (and preferably purchase several variants), and to spend a significant amount of time and effort testing and debugging CrossOver Linux Standard to work with it. C4 provides a way for us to assess the level of interest in your application.

You can also check out Tom Wickline's guide to Running Unsupported Applications in CrossOver.

You can discuss unsupported application with other users on discuss@crossover.codeweavers.com.

If the application is critical to you, we can work with you on a contractual basis to make the application work. In such a case, please contact us at sales@codeweavers.com to discuss the terms of the contract.

No, CrossOver will not interfere with your existing Wine installation. CrossOver and Wine each have their own Drive C: that will not be visible to the other.

Sometimes. Many security patches disallow loading executables at certain locations in the memory map. Some Windows executables are stripped of their relocation records, thus must be loaded at a specific address in the memory map.

For this reason, you may experience trouble running certain programs in CrossOver with security patches enabled. If you are using grsec, please contact us as we may be able to help you. If you are using the "not executable stack patch" for Linux, you may disable it for CrossOver by running the following command:

$ /usr/sbin/chstk -e ~/cxoffice/bin/wineloader

The error message usually looks something like this:

$ sh install-crossover-standard-7.0.0.sh
Verifying archive integrity...Error in check sums 2527639012 444965528

This indicates that the installer was corrupted. This is known to happen if you use the ftp download link in Netscape 4.x because Netscape performs CR/LF conversions in that case. The remedy is to download the file again using either the http link or a different browser.

You may also get an error like this:

$ sh install-crossover-standard-7.0.0.sh
Verifying archive integrity...OK
Uncompressing CrossOver
Office...................tar:
lib/wine/ntdll.dll.so: Wrote only 5120 of 10240 bytes
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
Extraction failed.

When installing, CrossOver setup first extracts itself to /tmp. If you get the above error message, there is insufficient space on the partition contain /tmp.

You can use the df command to display the amount of free space on each of your harddisk partitions:

$ df
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6              2063504   1638816    319868  84% /
/dev/hda7             14017840   6120332   7185432  46% /home
/dev/hda1              4096548   3267460    829088  80% /dos

Note that the /tmp directory is usually located on the root (/) partition (as in the above example), though there may be space elsewhere on your harddrive, the "Available" size for the root partition is what is important.

You can also tell the installer to extract its temporary files to a different directory by running it as followings:

$ sh install-crossover-standard-7.0.0.sh --target cxtemp

This indicates that the installer was corrupted. This is known to happen if you use the ftp download link in Netscape 4.x because Netscape performs CR/LF conversions in that case. The remedy is to download the file again using either the http link or a different browser.

Some Linux distributions ship with RGB profile that contains the a entry for the color Black instead of black. You should edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and look for the line containing the RgbPath. It should be like the following:

        RgbPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"

The file you would need to edit will be:

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt

Simply edit this file and rename the line the color Black to black in lower case.

OfficeSetup requires the Helvetica and Fixed fonts to be installed on your system. If these fonts are unavailable, the OfficeSetup window will not display properly, and it may produce an error message like the following:

font "" doesn't exist.

To fix this problem you should install the Helvetica and Fixed fonts, which should be available in your distribution.

Install 75dpi X fonts (XFree86-75dpi package). Be sure to restart X before you launch OfficeSetup again (restarting xfs is not enough).

This problem has to do with monitor DPI settings. The easiest fix is to set your monitor height and width to zero, and let X figure things out automatically.

To change these settings on RedHat, run redhat-config-xfree86 as root, and go to the Advanced tab.

Some versions of Linux (including SUSE 9.3) ship with SCIM turned on by default. This interferes with text entry in OfficeSetup.

The solution is to upgrade to SCIM version 1.4 or later, or turn SCIM off altogether.

Apparently, Debian 3.0 (Woody) defaults to using version 7 of these libraries. Debian contains a package which will install the libXaw.so.6 libraries. You simply need to install this package using the command:

$ apt-get install libxaw6

This problem can happen if you are using a Linux distribution that uses VFolders for the menus (mostly old Gnome 2 versions). This is typically the case for RedHat 8 and SuSE 8.1 and later.

The solution is to delete ~/.gnome2/vfolders/applications.vfolder-info. However note that if you delete this file you will lose any non-CrossOver related change you made to menus in you account.

Here is a list of simple steps that can help you identify the source of the problem and maybe even solve it. If not, please mention their results when reporting problems to http://support.codeweavers.com.

Running OfficeSetup gives the following error message:

Unable to get list of installed applications:
child killed: software termination signal.

Similarly, running any other application gives a "Terminated." message.

This problem happens when Wine fails to initialize correctly. This may occur for a number of reasons.

If these solutions do not work for you, please generate a debug trace file with the command below and send it to support.

$ ~/cxoffice/bin/wine --debugmsg +relay,+seh --cx-log start.log.gz uninstaller

Some Windows installers load the OpenGL Windows dll which uses the OpenGL capabilities exposed by the NVidia drivers. Unfortunately some of these drivers have bugs that will cause the installation to hang and print strange characters on the terminal.

One possible solution is to upgrade to the NVidia drivers to the latest available version. The bug seems to be present in versions 3123 to 4496 but unfortunately the status of later driver versions is unknown (we welcome feedback on known good and bad driver versions).

Another solution is to prevent Wine from using the NVidia OpenGL driver by running the following command:

$ touch ~/cxoffice/lib/libGL.so.1

Unix systems have the ability to constrain user processes to keep them from using excessive memory or CPU. These facilities are usually controlled by a facility called 'ulimit' (for User Limit).

Unfortunately, Windows programs will only function if they are loaded at very specific locations in memory. This makes it mandatory for Wine to have access to all of the virtual memory space. Certain ulimit settings (usually ulimit -v) prevent Wine from doing this, thereby causing a failure in CrossOver.

You can often work around this by running the following command in a console window:

$ ulimit -v unlimited

Then, from that same console window, you should be able to run the CrossOver applications successfully.

Unfortunately, the ulimit setting varies from distribution to distribution, so we cannot give you a specific guide to address this; you will need to find a distribution specific set of help pages for more help.

This system crash is usually caused by a bug in the SoundBlaster OSS sound driver which is triggered by CrossOver on some systems. In particular this is known to happen if the sound card is a "Creative Labs SoundBlaster VIBRA16".

We had reports that the ALSA driver is not affected by this bug. Thus this is the best solution although it may not be the simplest.

Several ATI cards (in particular the FireGL line) produce this error when running Wine. To work around this, edit your xorg.conf file and add the following line to the Device area:

Option "UseFastTLS" "2"

That should allow you to run CrossOver without problems.

If you are installing Office 2003 from a folder on the filesystem rather than from a CDROM or ISO image and you select 'Other *.exe file' in CrossOver Setup, in some cases the installation can fail. If you see this behavior, use 'Alternative CD-ROM location' to select the installation folder.

If this does not resolve the issue please file a support ticket.

Please see the question about Office 2003 above.

Some CDs contain 'hidden' files which may not be visible by default on Linux. This may cause your Office installation to fail with a 'file not found' error (eg. "can't find OFFICE1.CAB").

Versions of CrossOver Linux Standard after 1.1.0 will detect this issue, warn you and offer you to 'fix' your fstab configuration file, however the detection or fix may fail under certain circumstances.

The solution is to mount your CDROM using the 'unhide' option.

$ su
# mount -t iso9660 -r -o unhide /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
# exit

You can also add this option in /etc/fstab to the beginning of the 4th column for the cdrom. For instance:

/dev/cdrom      /mnt/cdrom    auto    unhide,defaults,ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0

It is important to add the option at the beginning of the 4th field as the Linux kernel ignores all options after an invalid one.

Additionally, if you are using supermount, changing /etc/fstab will not take effect until you remount the CDROM.

IMPORTANT: Note that some systems expect the "nohide" option instead of "unhide". The easiest way to find out which option is appropriate in your case is to search the mount command manual page (man mount). So if you tried the procedure above and it still does not work, repeat the process with the "nohide" option instead and see if it makes a difference.

Some installers expect that the file C:\Windows\wininit.ini does not exist. This file is processed and removed when CrossOver reboots.

To solve this problem, you can select the Simulate Reboot option from the CrossOver menu, or run the following command:

$ ~/cxoffice/bin/cxreboot

CrossOver provides support for most printers with no additional configuration necessary. However, you can customize your printer setup for CrossOver by replacing the generic printer description file with a specific one for your printer. This process is described in an appendix to the manual.

Certain Linux Distributions such as Ubuntu do not provide a 32bit CUPS library which is needed by CrossOver. The best solution for this problem is to contact your vendor and ask them to provide you with a 32bit CUPS compatibility package or install the 32bit KDE support libraries and use the Kprinter driver.

This behavior is due to a bug with older versions of the ghostscript package. The solution is to upgrade this package to at least version 8.15.3.

This is known to happen with cups and perhaps other printing systems. The suggested workaround for this is to filter CrossOver Linux Standard's output to remove an '%%Orientation:' line from the PostScript that is believed to confuse pstops. To do this you will need to edit the registry for the current bottle. Run the following command:

$ ~/cxoffice/bin/cxrun

Select the correct bottle, type in regedit for the command, run it and go to the following Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Printing\Spooler and change the line that reads:

"LPT1:"="|lpr"

to:

"LPT1:"="|grep -v ^%%Orientation: |lpr"

By default CrossOver interfaces with the Open Sound System (OSS). This default will also work if your Linux system is using the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) drivers and libraries, as long as the OSS compatibility mode is enabled. You can check whether your system is using ALSA by running the following command: cat /proc/asound/version. If you get an error then you are not using ALSA. Otherwise you will get the version of the ALSA driver and you can then check whether OSS compatibility is enabled by typing lsmod | grep oss. If you see modules called snd-pcm-oss and snd-mixer-oss then OSS compatibility is enabled.

But you can also configure CrossOver to interface directly with ALSA 0.9 or greater. To do so, check out how to change the CrossOver sound backend. However note that ALSA 0.5 or older is not supported so in that case you must use the OSS compatibility mode.

As mentioned below, the sound drivers will often only allow a single application to play sounds. A twist on this theme is that, by default, KDE (2.2 and greater) uses a new sound system called aRts which may already be using the OSS driver without your knowledge. Under this system, applications are supposed to send their audio to a 'sound daemon' which mixes them in realtime and sends the result over to the OSS or ALSA driver. This lets multiple applications play sounds simultaneously but also means they cannot play sounds directly anymore which is what CrossOver is doing.

Here are a couple of ways to deal with this:

The Enlightenment Sound Daemon (EsounD) is a sound server which is commonly found in Gnome and Enlightenment environments. Its principles are very similar to those of the aRts sound server mentioned above so for more details please refer to the first part of the aRts entry.

Older versions of CrossOver did not have support for a ESounD backend. With the release of version 5.0 we included support for this however it has not undergone as much refinement as the OSS and ALSA backends. It is recommended that if you are having sound issues and you run Gnone or Enlightenment that you check for the presence of ESounD.

To do so, start the Gnome Control Center, and go to the Sound section. If the Enable sound server startup checkbox is selected you can enable support for ESounD in a CrossOver bottle by changing your sound driver to ESounD. Open the correct bottle for your applications as documented here go down to Sound driver load order and select the Change button. Select the current sound driver, chose edit and rename it to ESounD.

Note that this may not be the best solution. If you still have problems with sound you can disable ESounD support in Gnome by starting the Gnome Control Center, going to the Sound section. And unselecting the Enable sound server startup checkbox.

CrossOver has multiple sound backends that allow it to interface with many sound systems. You can specify which sound backend is to be used by starting OfficeSetup and going to the Settings tab. There the Sound driver load order determines which sound backend to use.

Note that you can also list multiple sound backends separated by colons in your order of preference. However this can cause some applications to malfunction and is thus strongly discouraged at this time.

In many cases the sound drivers will only allow one application to access the sound device at any given time. This is always the case for the OSS (Open Sound System) drivers and quite often the case of the ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) sound drivers too.

So for instance, this means that if xmms is playing an MP3 file, CrossOver will not be able to play sound. One typical symptom of this problem is the absence of a Sound Out option in the QuickTime settings or that the sound volume will be disabled in Windows Media Player.

See also the sections about aRts and ESounD for related issues.

The i810 sound cards (and some other cheap sound cards) have limitations that make it tricky to support them. In particular they only support a specific sound format, or support several but only allow direct access in one of them. CrossOver is normally able to work around these limitations.

However the Open Sound System (OSS) drivers for i810 that are part of the Linux kernel have some serious bugs that prevent CrossOver from playing sound correctly. Thus it is recommended to either switch to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) drivers, or to upgrade your kernel to 2.4.27-pre3 or later, or 2.6.7-rc1 or greater as these kernels fix significant bugs in the driver:

Gary Wong:
  o [sound i810] silently ignore invalid PCM_ENABLE_xxx bits from
    userland

Herbert Xu:
  o [sound/oss i810] fix wait queue race in drain_dac
  o [sound/oss i810] fix race
  o [sound/oss] remove bogus CIV_TO_LVI
  o [sound/oss i810] clean up with macros
  o [sound/oss i810] fix partial DMA transfers
  o [sound/oss i810] fix playback SETTRIGGER
  o [sound/oss i810] fix OSS fragments
  o [sound/oss i810] remove divides on playback
  o [sound/oss i810] fix drain_dac loop when signals_allowed==0
  o [sound/oss i810] fix reads/writes % 4 != 0
  o [sound/oss i810] fix deadlock in drain_dac

If you are still having trouble with sound then check out the sound troubleshooting section.