CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hello world,

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has been released.

Fortunately, I had the time to upgrade my system. Crossover has been outdated on Ubuntu USC for several months now. A few months ago I was told by Codeweavers staff that the goal was to support the next Ubuntu LTS (14.04) with the newest version of Crossover via .deb and via USC.

My question now is:

• What happend? Crossover is still outdated in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS via USC. It's still on version 12.5.

• After reading this (known issues on 14.04 Beta), I'd like to know if it's safe to download and install the newest version of Crossover via .deb. Will it install smoothly with everything that is needed (dependencies, libs etc.) or are there any major issues?

Thanks,
Alex

Alexander Tornow wrote:

Hello world,

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has been released.

Fortunately, I had the time to upgrade my system. Crossover has been
outdated on Ubuntu USC for several months now. A few months ago I
was told by Codeweavers staff that the goal was to support the next
Ubuntu LTS (14.04) with the newest version of Crossover via .deb and
via USC.

IMO you rushed and so you pay the early adopter tax, which means: some things will be broken and you'll have to wait for fixes.

Alexander Tornow wrote:

My question now is:

• After reading
  this
  (known issues on 14.04 Beta), I'd like to know if it's safe to
  download and install the newest version of Crossover via .deb. Will
  it install smoothly with everything that is needed (dependencies,
  libs etc.) or are there any major issues?

I installed CX from the deb file just the other day on the test install of 14.04 64bit. It was smooth as butter.

[quote=408684]> (quote:598857)

---

Hello world,

I installed CX from the deb file just the other day on the test
install of 14.04 64bit. It was smooth as butter.

I am somewhat surprised: we have seen an issue in-house with 14.04 which we are in the process of addressing. In CrossOver 12, we included a version of wine which requires thread-safe access to X11. That, in turn, required us to ship our own libxcb, because common distros had buggy versions which would crash with the version of wine in CrossOver 12+. Our own libxcb appears to be incompatible with use in 14.04, or so I thought. If it's working for you, that's great. If not, moving the libxcb in CrossOver's lib directory to somewhere else (or just renaming it) seems to fix the problem for people who encounter it. We're working on getting a newer version of libxcb into CrossOver.

As for the problem of the USC showing CrossOver 12.5, the ubuntu software center has definitely received a higher version of CrossOver, but I guess it's not showing up. I will have to ping the software center folks again.

Hi Josh,

I believe I know the incompatibility you talk about but as I recall it only affected people using the FOSS video drivers.

@Silviu: Oh yeah, I rushed it alright. Normally I'd wait for the next .1 point release before considering jumping ships to a new LTS. This time I tried the new LTS via live USB and Virtualbox before installing it. The experience was good, so I decided to give it a go. I haven't had any issues whatsoever though. It's been a smooth and satisfying experience - as far as I can tell.

@Josh: Thanks for the information. How fast does the USC team react to situations like these? Does it take a while or are they relatively fast at addressing this kind of matter? If they're speedy, I'd just wait for Ubuntu to update the version on USC. I'd be willing to try the .deb if it's going to take a while though.

Cheers,
Alex

I personally like using a .deb anyway in general, and keeping the .deb to uninstall if later desired.

Linux Mint 17 RC came out. Also Ubuntu 14.04 based. Several other Ubuntu 14.04 derivatives came out earlier. But no problems with running crossover in any of them so far.

I should point out that the applications I've put in right now are primarily audio related apps, or small utilities. But for instance, several distros had new problems with laptop multi-video card setups for nvidia. In these cases crossover I assume won't work with certain apps after the upgrade. Then again I didn't run any apps with hardware video acceleration for almost a year, so I don't know what going on video wise. I used the reversion to older video mode trick necessary to get all newer versions of linux to boot on dual-video card laptops in the first place, then installed updated video drivers.

OK. Finally updated the remainer of my windows apps to their new versions after reinstalling linux on yet another computer. Everything I have non-game related works smoothly on 14.04.

Actually, some past issues with (double or not appearing) shortcuts also disappeared... may be due to the updates to the apps, maybe to interface improvements of the linux distribution.

This is on a different computer than before, so seems in general no problems, computer specific hardware driver related either.

Hi there,

sorry for taking so long to reply. I have been a bit busy lately, but now I have some free time to spare.

Thus the testing continues...

I tested the newest version of Crossover 13.1.3 on a fresh and updated installation of Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit.

Everything went just fine the first time I installed Crossover 13.1.3. The .deb installed all of the required libs and took care of dependencies. After testing the new release of Ubuntu, I formatted the PC and reinstalled the OS, updates and last but not least; Crossover. The installation itself finished as expected, but USC didn't inform me about that. It just kept showing me the "install" button. This "bug" has been happening to me for quite some time now and it only happens when trying to install Crossover via the .deb. Anyway, after a reboot, Crossover showed up just fine via the Unity-Dash, but was missing all libs again. So I had to follow the steps shown here to get it up and running again.

Just to be sure this isn't a coincidence, I will be testing Crossover 13.1.3 on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit via two laptops I have here. I'll report back asap!

Oh and Crossover is still outdated via USC.

Here's a short story about packages and the software centers in Linux Mint 17 and Ubuntu. Last week I created some packages for a project. Both packages had the exact same files in the debian folder bar the name and other specific info.

On Ubuntu, one would behave exactly like you describe. After hitting install and waiting for it to do its thing instead of putting a green checkmark and show it has been installed, it would show the "Install" button again. Checking via the CLI tools (apt-cache policy/show name_of_package) it would show that the package was indeed installed and the packaged application was working just fine. Neither of the packages would show up in the USC if I wanted to uninstall them. Synaptic could both find them and uninstall them. So could the CLI tools.

On mint, GDebi would install them both. For one of them, it would show that it was installed and offered me the chnage to remove or unistall, for the other one, it would just show a "Install" button. mintinstall could find them both, but it had trouble uninstalling. Or rather that's what it would have you believe because it appeared to stall at 99% but you could close it... so it did not freeze. Ofc, the packages would be completely uninstalled, with no issues. Heck I even played with apt client. A simple python session would be like:

import apt
cache = apt.Cache()
cache['packagename'].mark_delete()
cache.commit()

and even this went fine with the "troubled" package. It uninstalled the package, gave some non-critical warning about some files that were left behind (that's what you get for packaging stuff with dosbox or wine) and returned "True".

So yeah, I don't know what some of these "software managers" do these days but some of them are b0rked, with the USC being the worst offender.

Hello Silviu,

once again; thanks for taking the time to respond. Man, Codeweavers should hire you, considering the amount of time you spend posting and testing things around here.

Anyway, I tested Crossover on two other laptops today. Both of them had the same issue - missing libs and bugged install via USC. It's just extremly strange, because I can install other things via .deb without an issue. The only app that I have had issues with is Crossover. Also, Ubuntu is one of the officially supported plattforms that Codeweavers supports, yet these issues have been "bugging" us since Ubuntu 12.04. I can understand these things happening on an unsupported OS, like openSUSE, but not on a supported plattform.

After I installed Crossover yesterday, I tried to install WoW for my gf, but the installation would just hang when trying to install Visual Studio 2005/2008. Before that I was playing around with what I wrote in my previous post (= trying to find out what went wrong again). At this point I uninstalled Crossover to test something else...

Out of curiosity, I downloaded and installed vanilla Wine (1.7.19) and PoL (newest version) seperately, just so I can compare it to the current state of Crossover. Before I installed them via USC, I added the ppa-repository for both projects via USC. What can I say? Both apps installed just fine and both install, launch and run WoW out-of-the-box. Wine even updated itself via Ubuntu-Updates yesterday - and all I had to do is click once or twice on one or two buttons. PoL grabbed updates by itself too, offering me updated scripts and the newest version of Wine (1.7.20). Both projects support several Linux distros and offer an easy way to add a ppa, which will then update their software in an easy and fully automated way.

And that's not even talking about the lib issues Crossover has had. I understand some ppl don't want the "unessesary" bloat that comes with that decision. The alternative: If you can't offer all the libs in the default Crossover installation, at least make it optional either before, during or after the installation via a simple checkbox or dropdown-menu. That would make life so much easier.

Edit - deleted previous post: Nevermind what I wrote here. I was just a bit frustrated but after comparing and testing a bit with all three "products", I have come to the conclusion that Crossover can be a pain to deal with in terms of installation and updates, but both performance (for example, performance enhanced graphics created by Stefan Dösinger) and ease of use are still superior to anything else out there - but only after sucessfully installing everything correctly. My main concern remains unchanged though; I'd still like to see the issues fixed that have been pestering us since Ubuntu 12.04.