Hi all, I obtained a copy of crossover-office from
http://www.codeweavers.com (A minnesota based company who is very active
is wine devel and other things. What follows is an initial review of
thier product. This is not a very good test of M$ Office. Perhaps
someone with more Office savvy would like to give it a good thorough go.
Read below for my impressions. I'm a person who uses office 10 to 15
times a week for viewing, mild editing, and periodically for document
creation and should in no way be regarded as an Office Guru.

For those who think this email too long and just want the bottom line:
	Codeweavers ROCKS! This app is good enough that i wouldn't hesistate to
	recommend it to anyone! It allows me to do what I need to with Office
	without hassle or compatibility issues, and appears to be quite stable!
	Send them MONEY! ;-) In fact I plan to present this to the linux users
	here at sistina and make an attempt to get the company to purchase licenses
	for us to use this at work. Great job Codeweavers! Keep up the good work.


My System:
	PIII 600MHz
	396 MB PC100 RAM
	ATA-66 Hard drive
	Matrox G400 Video Card
	RedHat 7.2 with latest updates (no ximian)
	Enlightenment 0.16 
	X 4.1.0

The install:
	I downladed the installer which is the standard codeweavers installer
	which uses the stuff that the good folks at loki made available. The
	app installs into the users home directory (Mine is on NFS so speed
	is affected somewhat by that) The installer app is a meager 6.7MB and
	when all is said and done and office is installed you can expect
	approximately 270MB in $HOME/cxoffice/.

	Once the crossover installer is done it fires up the office setup
	"wizard" which has options for installing some fonts. I opted to
	install them all as I know office like it's fonts. This went smoothly
	and I proceeded to mount my office2k cdrom and proceeded with the
	install. It went just as I expected with one notable yet humorous
	exception. At the very end of an office2k install on something other
	than win2k or higher, the installer requires a reboot. At this point
	I was prompted with a funny dialog that read (I wish i'd wrote it
	down) something to the effect of "Normally the office installer would
	require a reboot. But since you're running linux this is not
	necessary. You may answer yes or no to the next question, it really
	doesn't matter" I click o.k. and was prompted by "Windows now need to
	reboot to complete this operation" I clicked Yes just for grins. The
	installer whizzed and banged and soon I saw "Please wait while
	windows configures microsoft  office" and just like that it was done.

	Then the codeweavers "wizard" fires up again to allow you to pick
	which mime type association you want to setup for your system.
	There's all sorts of non-office stuff in there like "audio/x-mp3" so
	I picked my way through and made sure to only associate the
	appropriate things ( Why I don't know because I don't use gnome or
	anything else )

	At this point i have it installed, i'm still skeptical but read-on
	for more goodies.

Actual program usage:
	Since I'm not running gnome I decided to check around in
	$HOME/cxoffice/bin for executables and was pleased to learn that I
	could execute "./winword" in that directory to start an app. There
	are symlinks for word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, the setup tool and
	some binaries and other miscelany. I promptly added them to my
	enlightenment menu. I then started every app in there one at a time
	to test for speed and was delighted that all the apps were reasonably
	fast and adequately usable. "Astonishing!" I thought and continued to
	poke and prod at the apps for a few hours looking for bugs and
	irritations and found only a few. The window manager had no problems
	resizing, moving, minimizing and overall managing the windows. The
	applications show up in the "window list" which allows "ALT-tab"
	movement between them. Overall I found all the office apps responsive
	and as they should be, with the exception of a few very MINOR things
	I'll outline below.

Bugs and Irritations: 
	I didn't do very thorough testing. Keep in mind I'm no office power
	user so alot of the functionality doesn't get touched by me. Below
	are a list of things I noticed were not quite as I'd expect.

	1.) Dragging the menubars around causes some lag and lack of
	responsiveness. It took me several tries to get Words toolbars spread
	out on the top so all were visible.

	2.) Fonts weren't as clean as I'd have hoped (See screenshot links
	below) I didn't do too much to fix this as it's adequate. I do have
	truetype support in X and as I say I did install all the fonts from
	the installer and have a good working set of TTF fonts that I use for
	X.

	3.) CPU usage was high during window movement and manipulation. As to
	be expected. Running win32 apps under wine is a NON-trivial task and
	some additional CPU work is needed. I'll try all this again on my
	athlon box just to see the difference. I wanted to do this test on a
	low to mid-range system for objectivity sake.

	4.) I'm a little bothered by the fact that with the two codeweavers
	crossover applications that I have, i have two seperate directories
	with two seperate "wine" versions installed in them. Granted they're
	very stripped down to provide only the neccesary binaries and
	libaries needed to meet the task at hand, still they add up. Add to
	this a normal wine install and a WineX install and that make 4
	versions of wine. I wish there was a way to avoid this but alas that
	solution escapes me. I understand why they did it this way, and still
	applaud all thier hardwork.

Screenshot Linkage: http://people.sistina.com/~blutgens/xover_screens/
-- 
Ben Lutgens				 | http://people.sistina.com/~blutgens/	
System Administrator	 | http://www.sistina.com/
Sistina Software Inc. | 

"If you love something set it free, if it doesn't come back to you
hunt it down and set it on fire" -- George Carlin
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