On Wednesday October, 31st, everybody can get a free copy of CrossOver with 12mths support.
CrossOver is an emulation layer for MacOS X and Linux. In contrast to virtualization solutions like VMWare, Parallels or VirtualBox, it allows running thousands of Windows applications, tools and games without having to install a legit Windows operating system.
Wine based Crossover 9.2 now brings Civilization 5 support to the Mac and Linux. Crossover runs flawlessly with Civilization under Snow Leopard and with some minor flaws under Leopard.
Prices
Aspyr will release a native Mac version of Civilization 5 before Chrismas. We would not wonder if the Crossover emulated Windows version is more performant than the native Mac version, but let’s see ;-)
Strange things can happen. With the Lameduck Campaign Jeremy White (CEO of Codeweavers) initially wanted to:
“(..) to inspire President Bush to make the most of his final days in office. Who knew that our Challenge would have this kind of impact on the country?” White said. “On the other hand, who knew that the economy would implode, causing oil demand to drop into the abyss and gas prices to plummet as well. Clearly, investigating Bear Stearns, AIG and those guys is misplaced – CodeWeavers is responsible for this mess. So it’s free software for all!”
Luckily for the american customers the price of a gallon decreased to 2.79$ on october, 14th and so Codeweavers will give away free copies of their Crossover software tomorrow (2008 october, 28th).
» Crossover’s press release here
» Crossover’s Lameduck Campaign
» Incomplete-Labs’ HowTo: Crossover and UltraEdit
[Update] Feb 2nd, 2011
It seems Iron is no serious project and only follows the intention to allure people visiting the SRWare Iron website in order to make money from Google’s adsense.
More information to be found here:
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html
What it is
The “Iron” browser is based on the “Google Chromium” source code, but “Iron” does not send any user specific data to Google anymore and it does not contain a unique user ID. Iron is a product of “SRWare” – a german software company. In Iron the following Google Chrome features have been deactivated:
Iron is available for Microsoft Windows only. Download Iron here (german page!). Installing in CrossOver Mac sadly does not work out of the box…
[Update] Sep 26th, 2008 The language Thing
Although our screenshot shows Iron with german interface, it turns to english, when it’s gotten installed to an english Windows version.
[Update] Sep 27th, 2008 The Next Browser Wars (internal link)
You may find some background information about the Browser Wars in one of our recent articles here.
Yes, it really is true. After only 15 (yes: fifteen) years of development, eventually there will be a version 1.0 of Wine. Back in the days I would never have expected them to survive that long, since nobody expected Microsoft Windows to be the winner of the operating system wars.
Anyway nowadays Wine is heavily sponsored and developed by Codeweavers, who commercially offer Crossover and Crossover Mac aswell. Both Crossover versions are based on Wine. Moreover ReactOS – a very promising operation to build a free and open source operating system, which is completely Windows API compatible – is also based (in parts) on Wine.
» WineHQ…
» Codeweavers’ Crossover…
» ReactOS…
And for the fun part. The most unanswered question is: did the Wine devs implement the same bugs into Wine like Microsoft implemented into Windows – means: will it really be compatible?
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