CrossOver Forum

Here is a couple ideas that I have for the future CX-Setup Tool.

1) Have a multimedia tab and in this tab have things like
test sound. And have CX play a little test sound. A test/calibrate joystick
option would be nice as well but the sound test would be great.

2) Have a "RUN" program and add shortcuts to the start menu
for it. then just like that other OS exec the Run program and run
word.exe ... simple/easy .. for people who are scared of a terminal
and you could add a search to it and default to the fake_windows directory.

3) Font preview would be nice 😊

4) Add a regedit.exe link somewhere and let the world know it has a nice front end.

5) have a way to remove a app from the installed list if it refuses to uninstall
and remove its self. = nice way to keep the installed apps list clean and neat.

6) option to add managed mode setting like you have for win version.
and a list of desktop resolutions

Tom

These are all good ideas. Hopefully some of them will trickle into future releases, as I find the time.

I have a couple of questions, though. In terms of the "Run" program -- do you know how the Windows "Run..." works, exactly? Right now we have a command-line method ("wine --cx-app word.exe") that searches the fake_windows directory for a matching .exe file. Would using that be appropriate?

And, for #6 -- what is that good for? Are there applications that work better in managed mode?

On number 6: Do you mean managed mode or desktop mode. For games under CrossOver, having a toggle to force the game into desktop mode would be nice. How about this: On the "Menus" tab, have an edit button. When you highight an app, and chose edit, you can pick from some options that updates the individual app config. Things like desktop mode/desktop res, dll overrides maybe (a very advanced option).

Hello Jer, Andrew

Yea your seeing what I had in mind, Lets take Star Wars Jedi Academy and Jedi OutCast as examples :)

Here is what I have in my config:

[AppDefaults\\jasp.exe\\x11drv]
; Star Wars JK Jedi Academy -- needs -- +exec setlanguage.cfg +safe
"Desktop" = "800x600"
"Managed" = "N"

[AppDefaults\\jk2sp.exe\\x11drv]
; Star Wars JK-2 Jedi OutCast -- needs -- +exec setlanguage.cfg +safe
"Desktop" = "800x600"
"Managed" = "N"

You can overlook the -- +exec setlanguage.cfg +safe it is just a reminder to me that I must pass this at run time for the game to run correct 😊

It is my understanding the "Managed" = "N" is so a app or game will not be
managed by the window manager? I always set this to "N" if I run a app or game in window mode. And so far its been working very well.

So I was thinking it would be nice to have this option when installing the app/game. It would just make things easy for new users if they wanted to use this option.. Who knows after the window managment re-write this may not be needed.

And as you already pointed out the Desktop option would be nice as well.

Make sure you kick win version into this tab as Sim City 3000 will only play as win2k 😊

As for the RUN app:
Me myself when I break down and use Windows ;) I like to start apps
from the little RUN program in the Start Menu, regedit, dxdiag, notepad
are some good exaples. ("wine --cx-app word.exe") is wonderfull but you still
need to open a terminal to use it ( I'm a huge fan of terminals btw ) I was thinking if ("wine --cx-app word.exe") could be hidden in a winelib RUN application and a link to it be in the Start Menu then all the user would need to do is Start Menu/ CrossOver/ Run a small winelib RUN program pops up and the user type in winword.exe and have word to run. And if possiable have a search and have it default to /fake_windows as wine cant run Linux apps so there is no reason to start in the home directory.

But someone will say ....

I'M OUT OF MY MIND!! :) Because there are shortcut links already in the Menu. And yes that is correct, but lets say you want to run odbcad32.exe
There is not a shortcut in the Menu and there is also not a shortcut in /bin
but if you run ~/cxoffice/bin/wine odbcad32.exe the app will run and it saves you the time of.

cd /.cxoffice/dotwine/fake_windows/Windows/System
~/cxoffice/bin/wine odbcad32.exe

So to make a long story short..... it would be nice for....

1) People who know what they want to run but dont know where it is.
2) A friendly GUI for all the ex Windows user who have just found Linux.
3) Anyone who has used Windows in the past 10 years is familiar with this.
4) Something for Lazy people like myself 😊

Tom

About a new CXSetup:
It would seem nice if CXSetup would be a full WineLib application too. It seems that would reduce the dependencies and make CXOffice more portable. Also maybe the registry checks in CXSetup would be faster. Another big plus would be that the overal interface of CXOffice would be consistent.
Combining this with my other feature request below, it seems that Wine would need some drag'n drop support first though. I don't know if it would be easier to add that feature to the current CXSetup 😊

Also all the WineLib apps that ship by default should be put in the menu or at least be availlable through the menu tab.

An extra appearance tab to set things such as the menu font size would be cool too.

People at CW are always suggesting this kind of thing too. (Winelib, GTK, etc.) The short answer is -- CXSetup will probably never be reimplemented. We have lots of better things to do (e.g. adding application support), and reimplementing officesetup would just add dozens of new bugs that we've already found and fixed the hard way.

The performance problems that you're seeing in cxsetup are not, for the most part, the result of communication between cxsetup and wine. The mostly have to do with Association and Menu issues that require searching entire large sections of the hard drive. We do have some performance-improving schemes in the works, though, which should trickle in over the next few releases.

I'm curious, though, when you talk about reducing dependencies and being more portable. Are you having dependency problems?

No, I never had any dependency problems.
I thought it might make porting Crossover to other platforms more easy though. Altough I do not use any other unix besides Linux, I think it would be neat to have MS Office running on several of them.
This is indeed meant as a lower priority thing though.