CrossOver Mac Beta 2 – Problematic Upgrade but Worth It

CodeWeavers recently sent round a mailing about the release of the second beta version of CrossOver Mac. I didn’t have time to play with it straight away but over the weekend I gave it a go. The upgrade was not problem free but it did fix one of my problems with CrossOver, IE now seems to work properly.

[tags]Apple, CrossOver, CrossOverMac, OS X, IE[/tags]

I looked in the email that was sent out, I looked on the download page and I looked in the .dmg file that the new beta was distributed in an nowhere did I see any instructions on upgrading so I assumed that it would just be a case of copying the new app over the old one. Not so. When I tried that I got an error telling me that the file CrossOver CD Helper was in use and could not be replaced. The replace stopped at this point and left me with an incomplete CrossOver that simply did not work at all. However, a quick trip to the command-line sorted me out with a combination of ps -aux and kill (my favourite command ). However, if killing processes from the command-line is not your thing then you can also kill the CrossOver CD Helper process which is preventing the completion of the replacement of the old version with the new from the GUI. To do this launch the Activity Monitor App in Applications -> Utilities. In the list of processes you see look for the one named CrossOver CD Helper, select it, and then click the button labeled Quit Process in the menu bar at the top of the window.

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Once this process is stopped you’ll be able to copy the new Beta in over the old one without problems and all should be well. You should not even loose your settings or bottles.

All the apps that used to work for me still work with the new beta but as well as that IE can now render my home page which it couldn’t do before. Scrolling with the track-pad/scroll-wheel also works now. In the first beta version this caused things to go very very weird. You can see IE running in CrossOver Mac rendering my home page in the screen-shot below. Unfortunately still no joy with FruityLoops. However, the new Beta is an improvement over the old and a step in the right direction. Lets hope things keep improving!

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