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 package creation feature is available on the Advanced tab in the Bottle Manager.
Alternatively you can create the packages from the command-line. For
instance the following command will create Debian and RPM packages for the
bottle-name
bottle:
$
~/cxoffice/bin/cxbottle --bottle
bottle-name
--deb --rpm
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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 system as though the bottle had been published on that system. |
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To create Debian or RPM packages you will need your Linux distribution's corresponding packaging tools. |
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.
Creating the CrossOver menus. To create the CrossOver menu entries, run the following cxmenu command as root on each system.
#
/common/software
/cxoffice/bin/cxmenu --ro-desktopdata --crossover --install
Setting up the Windows executable association. Associating the .exe extension with CrossOver lets users launch Windows executables (like notepad) by clicking on them in their file browsers. To enable it, run this command as root on each system:
#
/common/software
/cxoffice/bin/cxassoc --ro-desktopdata --crossover --install
Setting up the .tie association. To associate the .tie extension with CrossOver so that users can install Windows applications using CrossTie profiles, run this command on each system:
#
/common/software
/cxoffice/bin/cxtie --register
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 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 --ro-desktopdata --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.