| MS Office arrives on the Linux desktop (Part 2) |
(continuation)
One small step for Wine
Before describing my recent experiences with CrossOver Office in greater detail, I'd like to digress briefly to relate my history with its predecessor and junior partner, CrossOver Plugin.
I've been using CrossOver Plugin since last August, before it was publicly released, having been offered an opportunity to test an early beta version.
It amazed right from the start. When I first received the CrossOver Plugin beta, I was told that it would allow me to get Windows browser plugins working on Linux. Things like QuickTime and ShockWave.
"OK. No harm trying it," I thought. Not that I ever felt the need to run QuickTime or ShockWave enabled content.
I easily installed CrossOver Plugin (feeling a slight shiver travel up my spine as the plugins installed, apparently "believing" they were doing so on a Windows system), and soon watched QuickTime and ShockWave come to life on my system. I viewed a couple of QuickTime movie trailers, and then got back to work.
QuickTime on the KDE desktop
All that was nice, but what I really wanted was to be able to read the faxes I receive via email from eFax.com's electronic fax service. Since switching from Windows to Linux, I had not been able to come up with a way to read my incoming faxes, other than forwarding them to my wife's Windows system and reading them there.
After seeing how nicely CrossOver Plugin installed QuickTime and ShockWave, I tried using the setup utility's "other" option to install the eFax viewer install-file which I downloaded from eFax.com. The install went smoothly, eerily as though on a Windows system. But afterwards, I couldn't figure out how to make it work in Netscape, and started feeling discouraged.
Then I noticed that the eFax viewer's icon had magically appeared on my KDE desktop. I clicked it, and to my delight it sprang to life and allowed me to open up an eFax fax image file. It worked perfectly! I could even print the fax -- something I was unable to do with programs running under "ordinary Wine" on my system.
When I mentioned my success with the eFax viewer to Jeremy White, CEO of CodeWeavers, he reacted slightly surprised. He then explained to me that the eFax viewer wasn't actually a "plugin", but instead was a small application that CrossOver Plugin had dutifully installed for me, and which it ran under its implementation of Wine when I clicked the eFax icon. With that in mind, I configured Netsape so it would associate efx filetypes with the eFax viewer mini-app. After that, I could read eFax attachments from within Netscape on Linux, just like on Windows.
I sent White an email telling him how happy I was that CrossOver Plugin had solved my fax-reading problem -- and that as far as I was concerned, this capability alone made the new tool worthwhile.
His response was intriguing: "You have given me a fantastic idea that should dramatically improve the value of CrossOver Plugin -- it should be easy for us to make CrossOver automate the process you just went through."
And then White added this really interesting comment: "Last time I checked, the MS Word Viewer, Excel Viewer, and Powerpoint viewer all worked nicely in Wine . . . If they don't, it can't be too much elbow grease to make them work. We suddenly have the ability to make it easy for people to display incoming doc and ppt files."
Needless to say, CrossOver Plugin now boasts the ability to install viewers for eFax files plus the Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint file viewers, along with a long list of browser plugins (now including Windows Media Player).
Windows Media Player on the KDE desktop
CrossOver Plugin had proven itself useful not just for allowing Linux browsers to make use of many Windows browser plugins, but it could also install small Windows programs from an exe file. Too bad there wasn't a similarly easy and automatic way to install complex CDROM-based Windows software packages on a Linux system, and configure the system so the software would run properly under Wine. I mentioned my wish to White.
--- Continued ---
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