Nope, this isn't a virtual machine a la
Parallels or VMware for Mac, this is the real deal: CodeWeavers released the beta of CrossOver Mac, a WINE environment port to OS X that allows you to run Windows apps without actually running Windows. (Sorry everybody, Intel Macs only!) We kicked the tires on this sucker, and can definitely report back that it works -- well, mostly. Click on to check out what the CrossOver Mac beta is like!
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Yep, there it is, all 80MB of it.
It needs the quartz-wm library, though supposedly it will run without. We didn't try for this Q&D run, but c'mon, give it what it needs.
Obviously the first thing we wanted to see was IE6 on OS X. So what if we're gluttons for punishment! (P.S. -Did we mention how much we love Opera?)
Creating a new bottle (get it -- WINE, bottle?) takes a long ass time, and for some reason it defaults to Win98. We redid our install with an XP bottle, though we didn't see any difference.
Then it has to grab the IE installer from the web. That was an automated cinch.
Ah, how many times we've seen this dialog. IE, we missed you so.
Just your usual install, went very quickly.
Not bad for a beta!
Chortlegigglechuckle.
Yep, you guessed it, IE didn't work. Well, it started, but it wouldn't load any pages (including this one).
So then we wanted to try something that wasn't supported -- our favorite Windows FTP app, Filezilla.
We downloaded it and selected it with the installer wizard, not too difficult.
Despite the warnings we installed it to our XP bottle along with IE6.
Things went pretty fast on this one, too.
Yep, just the usual Filezilla installer.
Worked like a charm, no errors or nothin'.
And there we have our long lost FTP app. It even let us drill down into Mac .app files. Now
that's compatibility!
But alas, we got a startling reminder that yes, this is still a beta. Good luck!
posted August 31st 2006 3:52PM
Highly Recommended.
Crossover provides an easy way to test IE6 - great for a nascent web designer such as myself. Previously I was using screen shot web utilities which have (obvious) huge drawbacks.
As a mac-user and a very recent graduate, I didn't want to have to buy spend the cash on Parallels and Windows just to test IE. Now I don't have to.
I am definitely going to pay the reduced pre-release price of $40 (as opposed to the $200+ you would pay for other solutions).
The only negative is stability issue (IE sometimes freezes and flickers). The bugs should be ironed out by the time CrossOver comes out of beta.
Everything has worked for me so far and makes testing web builds in IE much easier at home. My only request is that they make it easier to install IE 5 and 5.5 as well. Was't able to do this using the most recent beta so hopefully they will add this later.
go to http://www.petitiononline.com/jacks/petition.html to vote for battlefront2 on mac if you realy want the game