CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Is it possible, in some fashion similar to crossover-pro's published bottles, to share cxgames bottles accross multiple users?

Perhaps this question is best answered by one of the staff members but I'd do it like this:

move the bottle to a public folder on the harddrive and then place low level alias in each users application support folders to link to the same bottle... I can explain this further later if ithis is how you like to do it.

~Keo

Sounds like what I want to achieve, I'd like to know more.

I'd like to do this too, but I'm concerned about file permissions.

If I install a game as user "me" in group "family" and user "kid" in group "family" wants to play it, things are going to need to be group-readable or group-writeable or something, and I don't think they are by default.

I'd really rather not end up installing a game in each account that wants to use it, so if you could elaborate, or if staff could offer an authoritative answer, that'd be great.

What we're talking about here is the "publish bottles" functionality that is present in Crossover Pro, only (not in CX Games). When bottles are published, a new copy of that bottle is created in /Library/Application Support/CrossOver Games/Bottles (as opposed to /Users/[user]/Library/Application Support/CrossOver Games/Bottles) that is readable by all user accounts on a system. When a given secondary user account then fires up Crossover Games and goes to launch the published app (which appears in their Programs menu), a bottle consisting mainly of symlinks that point to the publicly-readable "published" bottle is created in that user account's Bottles folder. User-specific files and folder are 'real' in the new bottle and read/writable, but all of the program files point to read-only files in the primary published bottle.

In theory you could set this up manually, but it would be a pain to get all of the permissions and symlinks right. For instance, you don't want to set the entire bottle's contents to read/write, because then any user can make fundamental changes to the program that multiple users are sharing.

Therefore, I'd recommend archiving the original bottle in the primary user account, and then placing that bottle in a shared location (i.e. /Users/Shared). Then you can copy that archive into the home directory of any given user account and restore from archive using CX Games. This will end up using about as much disk space as a fresh install each time, but it will certainly save some time and mouse clicks.