CrossOver Office: Cutting to the Quicken

By: Brian Proffitt
Thursday, August 29, 2002 11:20:32 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/4405/1/

Mixing Windows, Linux, and Metaphors

There is a phenomenon in most societies that causes people to resist change. Call it the love of status quo, call it social inertia, call it conservatism--the label makes little difference on the symptomatic outcome.

Which is this: introduce a new idea and unless you get a certain threshold number of participants in that idea who believe in it as if they were the ones who came up with that idea in the first place, then that idea is always going to be slow in getting up off the ground. It may even die altogether.

This is most assuredly not the case with Linux and its adoption by the IT community. Through its own strengths and virtues, Linux has quietly, slowly, built up enough momentum of its own. It has become a roaring freight train in the server and clustered server arenas, and now some of its energy is trickling to the consumer level, the desktop.

Many have argued that Linux on the desktop is not such a sure thing. Even pro-Linux advocates are fairly conservative about the prospects of consumer-level adoption. And the anti-Linux crowd? Well, the hits just keep on coming.

"Linux is too hard to learn." With GNOME 2 and KDE 3 running? Please, those environments are about as user-friendly as they come. And don't get me started on all the other cool window managers out there.

"Linux is too hard to install." That argument is so 1990s. Current Linux distros are no harder to install than Windows--in many cases even simpler.

"Linux does not have the right applications." Then you aren't looking hard enough. OpenOffice.org, and its cousin StarOffice, is every bit as useful as any office suite put out for Windows. KOffice, AbiWord, Mozilla, Evolution... solid products all.

But I cannot be quite so cavalier about that last statement. While there are excellent applications out there for Linux, that old bugaboo of intertia rears its ugly head even for me from time to time. There are certain applications out there that require, at least for me, a Windows or Mac be located in the house somewhere:

• Intuit Quicken
• Intuit TurboTax
• Microsoft Flight Simulator
• FAA Flight Training/Exam Software

These four applications are the reason I have a Windows machine sitting off to the side of my desk, only powered up for the once or twice-a-week occasion I might need them. Linux has (very satisfactorily) taken care of my other needs.

While I am an admitted geek, I have heard it stated by several sources that one of the biggest obstacles preventing so-called "normal" people from switching to Linux is the lack of small-business accounting software, such as Quicken. I could point to GNUCash, but let's face it--Quicken is wildly popular amongst the SOHO set as well as the home users who just want to balance their checkbooks every month. Quicken, it seems, has the intertia.

And this has been noticed by more than just the humble pundits--Codeweavers, Inc. took serious note of Quicken's popularity as well, and was apparently convinced of it since they have now added support for Quicken in the latest release of CrossOver Office 1.2.0.

Playing Leapfrog

Just to make sure we're all up to speed, CrossOver is not much more than a very organized form of WINE, the open-source Windows emulator that Linux users have been using for quite some time. What Codeweavers has done is take WINE and reshape it into an application that, instead of trying to be something for everyone, tries to be everything for a select few programs.

The approach, which on the surface seems a bit tentative, has actually paid off rather well. Even before this version of CrossOver Office was released, it could already support applications in Microsoft Office, followed soon after by support for Visio.

Codeweavers' selective approach is, thus far, a good one. By avoiding the "Jack of all trades, master of none" scenario, the CrossOver product actually does live up to most of its claims.

Some would (and have) argued that a product such as CrossOver Office is a bit of a sell-out--Microsoft is gaining from the continued use of their product line. Ultimately, they argue, Linux application development suffers because the demand for comparable Linux apps decreases. That may very well be--in the short term. But in the long-term, I think of products such as CrossOver and NeTraverse's Win4Lin and Transgaming's WineX as transitional bandages that have one ultimate goal: get as many users over to Linux as is possible.

Once the user base for the platform grows, it is only a matter of time before that influx of new revenue will be devoted to the building and improvement of the native Linux apps that we know must eventually be built.

So much for my theories, let's take a look at the product.

Setting Up the Office

Looking at CrossOver Office 1.2.0 proper, I found the product to be very simple to install, configure, and use.

Once you purchase and download the software from the Codeweavers site (or pay the extra $10 to have a CD shipped to you), all you need to do is run the shell-script you received from the company.

This, in turn, activates a very simple, two-step GUI installation tool. One-two, it's done and you're shown the main Configuration screen for the application (see Figure 1).

As the interface suggests, you are presented with a list of the supported applications that CrossOver will let you install (plus a catch-all "Other Application" listing for things not on the list). To begin, all you need to do is select the app to install and then click Add. You will then be asked for the location of the installation files and off you go.

Well, not exactly. If you want to hear the happy ending, I can tell you that I was able to install MS Office 2000 Professional on my Red Hat Linux 7.2 system. But the journey--that left a bit to be desired.

After I specified the location of my installation files on /mnt/cdrom, a scary little warning about Microsoft Office's hidden files (see Figure 2). I chose to simply proceed past this dialog, and then went on to specify where I wanted the software to be installed. Windows Installer revved up and began to run the standard MS Office installer.

Somewhere in here, things got a bit awry. I am running the Ximian GNOME Desktop on my system, and it was at this point that GNOME warbled an error message and crashed. It was not a horrendous crash--as soon as I acknowledged the error, all the screen elements came back--but only GNOME's. Inside the Windows-emulated screen elements, everything was a complete mess. Letters and words were completely missing within the Office Installer dialogs. I had to remember what each field and checkbox stood for as I limped through the rest of the installation. (Out of sheer luck, I had just re-installed Access 2000 on my wife's computer following a fatal hard-drive failure last week, so I remembered what everything was.)

Don't misunderstand--the mechanics of the installation proceeded smoothly--it's just that I was unable to read 95% of the text within the dialogs.

Towaards the end of the procedure, CrossOver pops up and tell you to go ahead and say Yes when the Office Installer asks you to reboot, which I thought was a well-placed message, especially for savvy Linux users who are racking up their uptime. What actually happens is instead of a real reboot, CrossOver will fake a reboot for the benefit of Office. (If you opt not to do this here, there is a Reboot command in the CrossOver application.)

Once that chore was done, Office proceeded with the rest of its set up, and utlimately I was left with the entire suite on my Linux desktop. Not to mention Internet Explorer 5.0, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player 2.0, and several new TrueType fonts. And let me tell you, there is nothing more surreal than seeing those apps listed on your Linux desktop (see Figure 3)!

I had good luck running all of the Office applications. Word, which I was especially interested in, opened up my old Word documents and displayed them with revision marks, comments and all. No glitches, no worries.

Actually, there was one odd thing: when I started Excel 2000, GNOME crached on me again. Nothing unrecoverable, just a reset of the screen elements again.

I was a little afraid that running these applications on my machine would hog up a lot of system resources, just as they do on Windows. But, although I did not a slight system slowdown, all of these applications ran pretty quickly. In fact, Word 2000 started up much faster than OpenOffice.org, which--though I love to use it--I am convinced is the slowest-starting app in the Known Universe.

Besides document handling, printing from these applications went flawlessly. I was able to print both to my local printer and the networked printer out on my Windows box.

With the exception of the rather disconerting installation, the Office apps really ran very well under CrossOver Office.

Quickening the Pulse

I cannot report quite such good news about the Quicken 2000 Home and Business application I installed on the same machine. Notice I wrote "installed," so there's not surprise ending: Quicken is indeed up and running on my Linux system.

When Quicken 2000 is installed, it uses the ubiquitous InstallShield application to handle the process. I thought that this might go more smoothly than that overblown Office installer. Well, in terms of interface, this was certainly true; no font display problems here. Unfortunately, something else bungled what should have been a smooth install.

Like most Windows apps, the InstallShield uses a multi-dialog step-though process to proceed through various choice points of the installation. This was also true here, except that instead of proceeding on to the next dialog after clicking Next, nothing would happen. On a whim, I minimized the dialog and then restored it--and only then did the next dialog appear.

This was not a single occurence--none of the dialogs would move until I had minimized/restored the dialog at each and every step of the way. A tedious process to be sure.

Once this was done, though, Quicken started up and almost ran as it was supposed to: if you could live without the presence of the SmartTabs.

SmartTabs, though nifty little window navigators in Quicken, were present when I ran the application, but the text was absolutely invisible. If you like SmartTabs, get used to doing without for now. Don't worry, there are other fast methods of switching from account to account.

What was more problematic, at least for me, was the awful rendering of the wizard-like dialogs used to set up things like, say, new accounts. The text and fields were a jumbled mess, and in many cases pushed off the right side of the dialog box to the point where you could not read the text.

In terms of functionality, the program worked fine. Accounts, reconciliation, reports, and graphs all functioned as they should, though there are tiny font glitches throughout that made me wonder what some element on the screen was. It was almost as if some of the custom Quicken fonts were not getting displayed properly.

Despite these glitches, I think a reasonably technical-savvy user could put Quicken to work on the Linux box with this tool and be happy with it. I would not sell this to a non-techie, though, until the interface issues were cleaned up.

Taxing CrossOver's Limits

The day Codeweavers announced their support for Intuit's Quicken, users were clamoring to find out if Intuit's other popular product, TurboTax, would also run. Representatives of Codeweavers were quick to state that while users were welcome to try, the application was not officially supported.

It's good they mad that caveat, because I have the sad duty to report that, right now, TurboTax does not install at all.

While initially the installation of TurboTax Deluxe 2001 went smoothly, there was a point in the process, right when the installer seemed ready to copy files, that the installation just hung. No explanation, no errors, no nothing. I tried a few different things, to no avail.

Hopefully, this will be next on the list of supported applications.

Wrapping Up

While the Quicken application needs quite a bit of clean-up (at least on my test machine), it is certainly functional enough to use in a small office situation. I would hope that Codeweavers will concentrate their efforts on fixing these glitches, because Quicken is a rather unique application in the small-biz/home accounting world and deserves a home on Linux.

As for Office, CrossOver Office seems to have this down pat. Given the availability of good office suites on Linux already, I don't think it's as important to try to support Office XP as it would be to enhance Quicken product support and perhaps add TurboTax and QuickBooks support.

At $54.95, the price is okay, though until these few bugs are ironed out, I would not be terribly happy if this was what I'd gotten for the over-$50 price tag.

Overall, I was impressed with the application, and I am eagerly anticipating the updates to CrossOver Office.