Running Windows applications with CrossOver Linux 6.0

Monday January 29, 2007 (03:02 PM GMT)

By: Mayank Sharma

CodeWeavers this month announced version 6.0 of its flagship Windows compatibility product. Now called CrossOver Linux, the new version is the first with official support for games. With its growing application support and foray into gaming, CrossOver Linux 6 is an excellent alternative for Linux users who are stuck with a Windows application at work or at school.http://applications.linux.com/applications/07/01/23/1725227.shtml

For gamers another option for running Windows-based games on Linux is Cedega:

http://www.transgaming.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=2&meid=-1

Reasons for not porting Windows apps to Linux are disappearing more and more... in this case, if it is written in Visual Basic it can now run on Linux and other OSes:Mono brings Visual Basic programs to Linux

linuxdevices.com
Feb. 20, 2007

The Mono Project on Feb. 20 announced that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications.http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9725385854.html

This goes along with the earlier thread about Linux device drivers now being created for free by Linux kernel developers. The freedom to run apps on the OSes of their choice is gradually coalescing for consumers.

While this is interesting, it has to be taken with a grain of salt. First of all, it is only VB.NET projects (I believe) and support for 3rd party controls and COM objects is practically non-existent (which effectively makes it useless for most custom made applications). The 2.0 set is not entirely supported and with something like this, you have to expect that their implementation of the API to have some bugs/issues.

No one is releasing an application tomorrow for Linux because of this. However, it holds promise that we may have .NET apps in the future that can be platform independant.

The 2.0 set is not entirely supported The article mentions the 2.0 set:this version includes many bug fixes and an almost complete ASP.NET 2.0 API (application programming interface) implementation.It'd be interesting to see how close they are to completing that API.

The article is fairly clear about this being a bridging-the-gap solution for a lot of .NET apps. In the small business world a lot of very specific apps have been cobbled together out of VB.NET over the years, so if they run under Mono on Linux that is a great breakthrough. Of course the Open Sourcing of Java is another great gap-bridging event.

...an almost complete ASP.NET 2.0 API ...
..says to me 2.0 is not entirely supported. If you've been folllowing this, you will see that they had a number of issues with their 1.0 and 1.1 runtimes, trying to emulate the behaviour on Windows..you have to expect the same will be true for 2.0 for atleast a little while.

In the small business world a lot of very specific apps have been cobbled together ... ...many of which use 3rd party controls, or COM or DCOM, all of which will not work under Mono. In fact, even among 3rd party .NET controls, I know of only one which works under Mono and it was only a quick test (ie. they installed it, it ran but they didn't test it thoroughly). So no official support yet.

I'm not slagging the project or the initiative...just saying the practical uses at the immediate time are far less than they suggest. Long term, it could be promising.

Definitely test your apps first - give it a try and let us know how it goes.

I program in .NET for a living (Web, Windows, embedded) and I did play with Mono Develop (C#) on Ubuntu (wrote a simple timer app that displays the date and time). I doubt the .NET applications that I wrote in Windows would be easily portable to Mono in Linux as the .NET framework for Windows (Windows Forms for Windows apps, Web.UI for ASP.NET) are completely different from those of Linux. It might be easier to port apps from Windows to Linux and vice versa if it was written in a portable language like Java (even though there would still be problems).

On a different vein, the easiest way to run Windows applications in Linux right now is to just use the VMWare Converter to create a Virtual Machine of your Windows PC, then run this Virtual Machine inside Linux using the free VMWare Player... I just created a VM of an old PC running Windows 2000 Server (running on an old Pentium 2) last night by using the free VM Converter and I was able to successfully run in in VMWare (though on XP not on Linux).

Here is a good article on using the free VMWare Converter to convert your Windows Desktop to a Virtual Machine which could then be run on Linux using the free VMWare Player (I followed this guide to create my VM): http://www.howtoforge.com/vmware_converter_windows_linux

Remember to check first if there is a native Linux port or version of your favourite app(s) or an Open Source app that does exactly what you need. If not, another method of running specific Windows apps on Linux is Win4Lin:

http://www.win4lin.com/index.php/content/view/64/125/

And the struggle to create a Windows apps API on X-Windows goes on with the WINE project:

http://www.winehq.com/
http://appdb.winehq.org/
http://frankscorner.org/

As was mentioned earlier in this thread, Crossover 6.0.