Chapter 7. Advanced Manual Configuration Options

Table of Contents

Installing CrossOver on multiple systems
Creating an RPM, Debian or Solaris package from a bottle
Installing onto a shared volume
Adding a new drive or customizing the drive label / serial number
Customizing bottles using bottle hooks
Setting the bottle search path

Installing CrossOver on multiple systems

CrossOver Linux Professional provides several ways to roll out Windows applications to a large number of users and on a large number of systems. The most basic of these tools is bottle publication which allows all the users of a single system to share a single installation of each application.

In order to install CrossOver on multiple stand-alone systems, we have provided the ability to create an rpm, debian, or solaris package from a bottle. Or, if you use NFS or Samba to share drives in your network, you can install using a shared volume.

Creating an RPM, Debian or Solaris package from a bottle

CrossOver has the ability to create an installable package out of a bottle. This service allows you to create a bottle on one system, package it up, and reinstall it on many additional machines. The resulting packages must be installed in conjuction with a corresponding CrossOver program package.

The Create a Package feature is on the Advanced tab in the Bottle Manager.

[Tip]

Although you can create a package out of any kind of bottle (root or user, managed or private), the bottle will be installed on any new systems as a Managed bottle as though the bottle had been published on that system.

[Tip]

A bottle package works best when installed on systems that are very similar to the one on which the package was created. Installing a single package on a variety of different Linux distributions may produce unreliable results.

Once the bottle package installation completes, the new system is ready to go. Make sure that you have purchased a CrossOver license for each system that you're using, and be careful to comply with all of the license terms for each Windows program. CrossOver does not enforce software licensing restrictions.

Installing onto a shared volume

CrossOver Linux Professional may be installed on a shared volume and run on multiple systems. First, make sure that files created by root on the shared volume will belong to root. For instance:

# touch /common/software/root-file
# ls -l /common/software/root-file
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Nov  4 14:07 /common/software/root-file

This should show that root-file belongs to root. Once this works, delete root-file and install CrossOver, specifying the shared drive as the install location.

If you are happy to run applications using the command line, then you're done. However, if you would like menus and associations to be available on your users' machines, then there are a few more steps.

Creating the CrossOver menus.  To create the menu entries for CrossOver utilies (e.g. for the Bottle Manager), run the cxmenu command as root on each system.

# /common/software/cxoffice/bin/cxmenu --crossover --install

Setting up the .exe association.  To associate the .exe extension with CrossOver so that users can launch Windows executables (like notepad.exe) by clicking on them in their file browsers, run this command on each system:

# /common/software/cxoffice/bin/cxassoc --crossover --install

Creating menus, associations, and plugin links for Windows applications.  With Private Multi-User installs, each user will have his or her own Windows menus, associations and plugins.

In order to create menus and associations for Windows software (e.g. "Microsoft Word") in managed bottles, run the cxbottle command as root on each system, like this:

# /common/software/cxoffice/bin/cxbottle --bottle default --install

That will install all the associations, menus, and plugins associated with the default bottle onto your current system.

[Important]

If you have more than one managed bottle on your shared drive, you will need to install each one, like this:

# /common/software/cxoffice/bin/cxbottle --bottle bottlename --install