CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hello, I'm new to CrossOver and slightly familiar with Wine/WineBottler. I have an older windows app used for an older, VERY specific engineering product, that I was able to get to run without any problem via CrossOver, however when I try to package it myself with WineBottler I get a common error message. Does CrossOver create a file like a WineBottle package that I can share with other mac users who don't have CrossOver to run this software? I understand if the answer is no, as it may defeat the purpose of paying for CrossOver, but I remain hopeful. If anyone has any suggestions on how to use WineBottler in the same way CrossOver works, for software that currently has very few users (think small group of enthusiasts) I'd appreciate it, as I certainly can't afford the $4-9k PortJump! Regardless, CrossOver is great, and I'm amazed they got 32-bit to run on Catalina!

Hi there,

I'm very happy to hear that CrossOver is working well for you!

To answer your question, other users will need to also have CrossOver in order to use a bottle you created. But there are quite a few options for enabling other people to use the target application with Wine on Mac.

If it involved quite a bit of setup to get your application running, you can always export your bottle to an archive and then share it with other users that way, and they can import it into CrossOver. But if it's pretty simple, you can just create a crosstie for the application, configure it appropriately, and then other interested users can just select the application within CrossOver and easily install it themselves. Lastly, you can always investigate alternatives like Wineskin.

Best,
Meredith

Using CrossOver the way Meredith explained using archived bottles would be a viable option.

WineBottler was last updated September 3rd 2019 and uses a build of wine-4.0.1 so that will not be a viable option for macOS Catalina and later systems.

Meredith Johnson wrote:

Lastly, you can always investigate alternatives like Wineskin.

Currently Wineskin is the only alternative that allows making self contained “ports”, the current “Engine” is loosely based on crossover-sources-20.0.4.

wine upstream has rejected the 32-on-64 implementation used by crossover for various reasons, so if you want to send your 32-bit app to a friend, send them the bottle and tell them to buy crossover.

V wrote:

wine upstream has rejected the 32-on-64 implementation used by
crossover for various reasons, so if you want to send your 32-bit
app to a friend, send them the bottle and tell them to buy
crossover.

CodeWeavers 32-on-64 requires a custom version of llvm-clang to compile along with other reasons causing it to be rejected.

However upstream is working on a different implementation of 32-on-64 that won’t require a custom compiler just not sure how long it’s going to take exactly.