ASCE™ - Knowledge Base KB2

Adelard ref: KB/2/3016/2

How to install ASCE on Linux/Intel Mac OSX using Crossover Office

Date: 11-Nov-2007

Description This article describes the options for running ASCE on Linux and Mac OSX. ASCE has various Windows dependencies including Win32 and Internet Explorer. Therefore it cannot be run directly on Linux/OSX without some additional software to provide these services.

There are two approaches:

• Use a virtual machine such as VMWare, Parallels Desktop or QEMU and then install Windows and ASCE into the virtual machine. We recommend that Windows 2000 or later is used as the client operating system for installing ASCE.
• Use a replacement for Win32 libraries, such as Wine. This is described in more detail below.

Wine and Win32 replacement

In this approach, no hardware emulation is performed, instead the Windows environment (Win32) is replicated, and then the software installed onto that layer.

Currently the most well-known project to implement the Win32 environment is the Wine project. This is as yet incomplete, but good progress is being made, with some applications now running unmodified. However, currently, it can be quite difficult to install applications and configure the environment.

Crossover Office is a product from Codeweavers which builds on the current status of the Wine project to make it more usable and provides support for key desktop applications that do not run in the opensource version of Wine yet (including MS Office, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat etc). Evaluation versions of the product can be downloaded from the Codeweavers website.

ASCE 3.5 in Crossover Office v6.2

 Installing ASCE is quite smooth now on Crossover Office v6.2, now released for Linux and Mac (Intel only):