Table of Contents
CrossOver Linux 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.
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 conjunction with a corresponding CrossOver program package.
The Create a Package feature is on the Advanced tab in the Bottle Manager.
Or, from the command-line, you can type:
#
cxbottle --bottle BOTTLE [[--deb][--rpm]] [packaging-options]]
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Although you can create a package out of any kind of bottle (published or private), the bottle will be installed on any new systems as though the bottle had been published on that system. |
Once the bottle package installation completes, the applications it contains are 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.
CrossOver Linux 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
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Nov 4 14:07 /common/software/root-file/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.
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To create menus or associations on a system, the root user of that system must have write access to the published bottle. |
Creating the CrossOver menus. To create the menu entries for CrossOver utilities (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 as root on each system:
#
/common/software
/cxoffice/bin/cxassoc --crossover --install
Creating the menus, associations, and plugins for the bottles. With private multi-user installs, each user will have his or her own Windows menus, associations and plugins.
In order to recreate the menus and associations of a published bottle, run the cxbottle command as root on each system, like this:
#
/common/software
/cxoffice/bin/cxbottle --bottlebottle-name
--install
Where bottle-name
is the name of your published
bottle. If you have more than one published bottle on your shared drive,
repeat the above command for each.