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WINE, xwine, CXoffice for Studio MX


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'ning all,

 

I tried out Crossover Office v3 a while ago, and found Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks installed perfectly. I never got around to using them heavily, or installing the other Studio MX apps, but the experience was positive.

 

Now I'm looking to setup the whole Studio - DW, FW, Flash and Freehand - as part of my ongoing "can I live without Windows" experiment. Before I roll up my sleeves and get stuck in, I'm appealing for any advice that might save me some wasted effort.

 

CXoffice made installing everything really easy, and if I understand correctly the graphical installer (including the invaluable 'you-need-this-first-here's-where-to-download-it' tips) are what distinguishes it from the basic WINE. Is this correct / is there more?

 

I'm quite prepared to cough up for this proprietary app (it's not too dear really) if it saves me weeks of config hell. In your experience, is that what awaits me with WINE?

 

Also, I came across a program called Xwine, installed it and it seems to run OK though I've not really done anything with it (in case doing so makes later jobs harder). Does anyone have feedback about the usability/stability of this app?

 

I hope this isn't too generalised - but I guess that's the nature of it, general best-practice info seeking. Hope someone can 'contribute' (pun not intended - I won't be looking to install that hunk o' sh*t)

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

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Winetools is pretty much close to the Crossover functionality- it's just unofficial, and supports different packages- but to my knowledge most packages that install to Crossover install to a fresh Wine (currently using 20050310) and vice versa.

I run on the above wine version IE6 SP1, Photoshop 6, Visio 2000 and a few other heavyweights with fine results. I have also tried Crossover and really liked it's ease of use, but IMHO it had nothing substantial to offer on top of wine for the average Joe.

The only landmark addon to a Linux dstro is VMware- the new ver. 5 is simply terrific, but alas, painfully expensive as well...

Edited by scarecrow
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a bit off topic...

 

I hope you have a very good reason to install IE6. I think it's a huge step backward when people are switching to firefox. Yes, it's immune to some of the vulnerabilities because it runs in linux. But...

 

...maybe you just want to use it for testing your webpages :)

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Heh... yep, I should have explained. It goes like this:

 

Dreamweaver requires MDAC (Microsoft Data Acces Components)

MDAC requires IE

 

...plus admittedly it does save me rebooting to check my pages in IE (the only malware in my pages is IE-compliant code hacks, and I've almost eliminated those too).

 

Unfortunately, having installed CXoffice (that price-tag's looking ever more reasonable after my adventures so far), installed IE6 and it crashes when I try typing in the address bar. Not so good, but hey at least all the MX apps installed okay! Only real 'bug' I've seen is the rendering of Flash content (like in some of the tool panels) is invisible until rolled over with the mouse.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I wonder if this would work for web apps that require IE6 like Sharepoint Portal ?

 

I might give it try over the weekend, install a full office 2003 with Infopath, install IE6 and then try to use Sharepoint.

 

If that works then it elliminates the only reason for me to have VMWare installed with windows running in it.

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I met a guy some time ago that was just giving away free copies of VMware for windows, the installer was about 20MGs. do you think it was a pirated version or could it had been a special promotional release??

I ask this because at first I saw it as something not too odd, is a small file...hadnt ever heard of VMware before....but now I see that every release is charged, you might download but you have to pay so I have a little confusion here and I would like to use VMWare on my mandy distro.

cheers

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VMware has some "cheap" ( = not very expensive) educational licences, but for sure no free edition- so what you saw was warez.

The current v.5 installer for Linux is circa 60 MB, and works fine on most mainstream distros, including Mandy- provided that you have $ 300 to spare for a licence.

Edited by scarecrow
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  • 3 months later...

Just coming back to this for the sake of an update.

 

Couple of months back I went over to Gentoo, and - um - forgot to backup the CXOffice installer :oops: for some reason this prompted me to try getting everything running in vanilla WINE.

 

It took a fair amount of trial and error, but I have now done it. What I learned (bear in mind, some of this is Gentoo-specific):

 

1) wine-20050725 would not let me install MDAC_TYP.EXE (Microsoft Data Access Components, needed by Dreamweaver). Got round this by downgrading to 20050624.

 

2) A bug in Gentoo's latest ebuild for X.Org (6.8.2-r2) causes all icons with transparency (e.g. most toolbar icons in IE and the Studio MX apps) to appear black. Downgraded to 6.8.2-r1 which fixed it.

 

3) The best 'helper' utility I tried (and I tried 'em all) is wine-config-sidenet. I recommend acquiring dcom98.exe and instmsia.exe and placing them in the setup folder before running the setup, so it installs them for you. (I believe the latter, which is the MS Installer utility, fixed the InstallShield probs I was having earlier when trying to install Studio MX.)

 

4) WINE's Notepad can be replaced with XP's, if you want the bonus-feature of saving in different encodings.

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