Community Forums - Unsupported Builds

I have made the unilateral decision to build and make available a PCBSD version of CrossOver Games
(which will hopefully be followed by a version of regular CrossOver as well). Most of my fellow
coworkers think I'm crazy, and they're probably right. There is no evidence that there is any
real market here; Linux is small enough on its own.

But Kris and many BSD folks asked me so nicely, and so patiently, and it turned out that getting
it built wasn't that hard, and it seems bitterly ironic to me for Linux Desktop people to diss
on BSD desktop people. I just don't like being that guy.

Of course, I'm being a bit cheesy about it. We won't support it (no one but me has a BSD install,
and mine is just a VM). We're not doing much of the work required to make Wine run properly on BSD,
and a fair amount more work is still required. For more details, see this page:
http://wiki.jswindle.com/index.php/Free_BSD
So that does mean that the BSD version of CrossOver will not be quite as good as the Linux version.

But nonetheless, I would like to call out a challenge to BSD users. You can prove me wrong by
voting for BSD support here:
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=573
Only customers can vote. But it's easy to game the system; most of our customers don't vote.

In fact, if 135 people bought CrossOver Games and voted for it, it would become our top voted application.

Right now, it has 1 vote. So I have evidence that exactly 1 BSD advocate has ever given CodeWeavers money.

So now is the time; if you want to create any scrap of evidence that their might be even a tiny
financial justification for making this build, this is the time to pony up and buy a copy of CrossOver Games.

Otherwise, I'm going to have a hard time avoiding the crazy stares around the office, and I'll probably
end up deleting the BSD vm later in the year.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Jeremy,

I asked a while back if this was even possible, and at the time, you said...nope. So imagine how glad I am to see this?

I am renewing specifically because of this post. Ok, I would have done so anyway, but this put me over the top. PC-BSD is awesome.

I am going to download and test the heck of out this.

Cheers,
Justin

I have been pondering whether to switch from linux to a BSD, but I`m curious: Will there be a version for, say, FreeBSD, later on?

Ive been testing FreeBSD for a few weeks now in VMware, and Im quite taken with the handbook. I do not believe PCBSD has such extensive documentation.

Edwin,

I believe that the PC-BSD version runs on FreeBSD as well. The only thing to ensure is that if you are running 6.x, you must apply this system patch before running wine apps:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Wine

If you are on 7.0 or later, no patch should be necessary.

Can I download the unsupported FreeBSD trial if I go to 'try now'?

If it functions - you have my $ and vote.

Which version of WINE is it based off of, or if SVN/CVS, around the time of which version? Right now I find that Wine 0.41 works great on FreeBSD 6.2 , but higher WINE versions, and 6.2 is unhappy (at least from ports). Likewise, If I go down to 0.41 and lower, FreeBSD 7.0 is quite grumpy, but 0.56 runs wonderfully. I guess my point is, I want to set my expectation level, since my machines run on 7.0 now.

Thanks,
-Jim Stapleton

Edwin Lugtigheid wrote:

I have been pondering whether to switch from linux to a BSD, but I`m
curious: Will there be a version for, say, FreeBSD, later on?

Ive been testing FreeBSD for a few weeks now in VMware, and Im
quite taken with the handbook. I do not believe PCBSD has such
extensive documentation.

PC-BSD is compatible with the FreeBSD handbook. As far as I understand it, the PBI structure, installer, and KDE tweaks all sit on top of a standard FreeBSD 6.3 base.

I have been watching PC-BSD for a while, I think it's time I dedicate some hardware to it smile. I have another round up upgrades on my home systems coming up soon. I think I'll just buy a new machine as my main workstation and use my current one for PCBSD and other testing.

I'll also forward this post to a few BSD junkies I know ..

Henti

Ricardo Cuevas
User ID: 52764
Order time: 2005-12-01 12:57 <- original Order.

voting

I'm renew only for this. I'm prefered FreeBSD, I was buy Linux version but I want freebsd version.

renew order: cw-73060

Sorry by my poor english.

My vote and my pledge it's not update on the page. Why?

Jim Stapleton wrote:

Can I download the unsupported FreeBSD trial if I go to 'try now'?

If it functions - you have my $ and vote.

Which version of WINE is it based off of, or if SVN/CVS, around the
time of which version? Right now I find that Wine 0.41 works great
on FreeBSD 6.2 , but higher WINE versions, and 6.2 is unhappy (at
least from ports). Likewise, If I go down to 0.41 and lower, FreeBSD
7.0 is quite grumpy, but 0.56 runs wonderfully. I guess my point is,
I want to set my expectation level, since my machines run on 7.0
now.

Thanks,
-Jim Stapleton

You need to go to this page:
http://www.codeweavers.com/account/downloads/?_dl=unsupported
(you may need to be logged in first, but I don't think you have to be a customer)
to get the trial version.

It's based on Wine 0.9.60. And set your expectation level low, please :-/.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Ricardo Cuevas Camarena wrote:

My vote and my pledge it's not update on the page. Why?

For performance reasons we only tally votes and pledges nightly. It will appear within 24 hours.

Realistically,

What level of votes or pledges would you need to see to move this project along?
Are projects in your company based on pledge/level of difficult type of approach?

I see apps with pledges in the thousands (office 2003) with only a bronze level of support. Is that because of the level of difficulty?

There are already over 2K pledge for the PC-BSD port. Is that enough to get your company at least minimally interested? If not, what number would really get this moving?

Well, our costs are generally much higher than anything anyone has pledged.
No pledge has ever come close to covering our costs.

But we find the numbers are a useful barometer, and we use the votes and
the pledges to set priorities. So, for example, the Office 2003 group
mostly has pledges around Outlook. So Outlook has been our #1 priority for about
the past 18 months. And yes, it has been that hard, and yes, it's not quite to Silver
yet (I think with 7.0 we will finally move it to Silver).

BSD support is not as hard. We're doing it informally; luckily, there are BSD developers
who are doing a lot of this work on their own. And because we can leverage the work
of the open source community, we're able to do these ad hoc BSD builds fairly cheaply.

But there is some real work to go yet; there are nitty gritty low level details to iron
out (the wiki above has some of them; Alexandre thinks there are more than what is listed there).

My gut guess is that it's about 3-4 months worth of work of a dedicated developer. That's between
18,000 and 24,000 Euros these days. That's raw cost; there'd also have to
be an opportunity on top of that to justify the work. So a clear shot at $50K would
be compelling to us. (To date, I have solid evidence of ~$500 in revenue from the BSD build).

The good news is that the community (i.e. volunteer developers) are doing a lot of the work anyway;
that's the great thing about open source. So it's likely to simply get better over time without
us having to invest any energy into it.

The further good news is that we've had enough of a response - not a ton, but at least not zero - that
I'm planning on doing a CrossOver 7 BSD build.

And remember, even if we never produce a BSD build again, everything we do in Wine is immediately available
to any BSD user. That's one of the cool things about Free Software.

Cheers,

Jeremy

OK, I got an installed it. The windows software doesn't list any games I have much interest in and haven't already gotten working in vanilla WINE. Are there other improvements aside from the windows software installer?

Also, a side note, is there a particular reason for Crossover Games vs. Crossover Office for BSD? I could be wrong, but FreeBSD tends to target the professional audience. While there are certainly a lot of professional sysadmins who like a good frag-fest (more so than not I think), I would expect Crossover Office to be a more popular product.

Oh, and do you support gift certificates? I have a friend who DOES play some of these games, and is the one who turned me on to FreeBSD. I'd like to buy her a copy for her birthday, but I figure if both of us are getting a copy, we should both get a vote.

Thanks,
-Jim Stapleton

Well, actually, no, it's not going to be much different from vanilla Wine.
A slightly friendlier installer, a way to manage bottles, support from us
(and a way to support our work on Wine), that's about it. We may have 1 or
2 patches that Alexandre won't accept because he's a purist, but that we think
will make things nicer for our customers, but CrossOver really should be
the same as Wine - because we put all of our work in Wine first.

We did cxgames bsd first because it's the first product we've shipped
since I promised Kris I'd do these builds. I plan on doing regular CrossOver
once we ship CrossOver 7 as well, and then that will be more of a fit for
non game applications.

And I'm afraid we don't have gift certificates, but you can buy on behalf
of someone else. Does that help?

Cheers,

Jeremy

I recently moved from XP on my old dell to PCBSD and my only motivation to use PCBSD aside from good overall feedback was the codeweavers games test installer. I bought codeweavers wine many years ago and found it frustrating. it has come along way and i see my self buying a supported copy again due to its great functionality and the fact that i'm sooo sick of windows. worst case ill roll back to fedora and run the supported linux version since linux is still free :) i'd like to thank you for making a bsd version tho. bsd is a true os. linux has many issues due to the fact that its just a kernel w/tons of mods that need constant attention - yum anyone? bsd is a wonderful os due to its overall consistency and i hope that it makes it to production.

Justin Whitaker wrote:

Edwin Lugtigheid wrote:

I have been pondering whether to switch from linux to
a BSD, but I`m curious: Will there be a version for, say, FreeBSD,
later on?

Ive been testing FreeBSD for a few weeks now in VMware, and Im
quite taken with the handbook. I do not believe PCBSD has such
extensive documentation.

PC-BSD is compatible with the FreeBSD handbook. As far as I
understand it, the PBI structure, installer, and KDE tweaks all sit
on top of a standard FreeBSD 6.3 base.

So, if I understand correctly, I could run the loki-installer for PC-BSD, on FreeBSD with little (or no) risk of problems.

So next step is to do that for OpenSolaris as well? :)

http://www.opensolaris.org/

Gilles.

Gilles Gravier wrote:

So next step is to do that for OpenSolaris as well? :)

http://www.opensolaris.org/

Gilles.

😅

I was afraid of that question...

Seriously, this remains the best place to motivate us:
http://www.codeweavers.com/support/forums/unsupported/?t=23

But I suppose it won't hurt me to download the iso...

Cheers,

Jeremy

Edwin Lugtigheid wrote:

So, if I understand correctly, I could run the loki-installer for
PC-BSD, on FreeBSD with little (or no) risk of problems.

Well, it's a completely unsupported build, so I would say that you have a high risk of problems. However, it's reasonable for you to hope that running that Loki installer might do something useful, and it shouldn't destroy your computer...

Cheers,

Jeremy

Jeremy,

Any word on a CrossOver Office unsupported yet? I keep getting folks asking about it, lots of them want to run Office for different things. FYI, one of them did test Office XP on vanilla wine, and it works great, so the CrossOver version should be functional as well :)

Kris Moore wrote:

Jeremy,

Any word on a CrossOver Office unsupported yet? I keep getting folks
asking about it, lots of them want to run Office for different
things. FYI, one of them did test Office XP on vanilla wine, and it
works great, so the CrossOver version should be functional as well
:)

Well, we've got to ship CrossOver 7 first, and we're still grinding away on that. Getting closer...

Cheers,

Jeremy

[quote=3]> (quote:102571)

---

..., and it shouldn't destroy your computer...

(Grins) True, Im not looking for a HDD saying "kaboom", and if my install is ruined, my brains goes boom... but theres one really good thing for that: dump and restore ;)

I'm running Ubuntu on this desktop but would really, really like to switch to PCBSD. Interoperability is so much better on the BSDs, both because they are (or can be) compiled from source and thanks to all of the compile-time options. The fact that KDE on PCBSD has a memory footprint that's 25% smaller than KDE on Ubuntu is icing on the cake.

That said there is one thing that's keeping me from switching: VMware. Gotta have it for the multi-OS support (Solaris, Linux, BSD and Windows). I've read that FreeBSD 7 can support Linux binaries but suspect that VMware won't be supported. Has anyone tried?

Can't wait

Editing post because it was silly. My question was answered earlier in the thread. Ill begin testing promptly.

Is your unsupported build compatible with PC-BSD 7?

Thanks
Karl

Thanks, a PCBSD crossover games would be greatly appreciated.

Rick.

I'd sure like to see this fly. Do i just donate money or do i have to buy a linux copy first?

robert anderson wrote:

I'd sure like to see this fly. Do i just donate money or do i have
to buy a linux copy first?

The official request is to buy a Linux copy and then vote for FreeBSD.

At this point, we're continuing with mild attempts to support it, though, so your alternate is
to pledge instead if you'd rather wait until it is less mild. Here's the relevant entry:

http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=573

Basically, we have evidence that 30 people have bought, or about $1,200. That's not really
enough to justify a lot of work (or really, any work ☹️), but Francois and I like doing this sort of thing, so we'll likely
noodle along. Of course, I have no idea if the 9.0 gui even compiles... /me makes note
to go see.

Cheers,

Jeremy

heh,
ive honestly been having a good hard look at PC-BSD these days. it seems to be quite an awesome distro! so far ive only been using it in virtualbox, but i am pretty satisfied I will one day completely switch to BSD (or an opensolaris dirivitave such as StormOS). will be interesting to be using crossover on those platforms :)