CodeWeavers are giving their award-winning CrossOver software for free.

What is CrossOver?

CrossOver is a tweaked and polished, proprietary version of Wine – an implementation of Windows API for Unix. Simply put, it’s a software which allows you to run Windows applications on your Unix system. Wine, especially since the 1.0 release, is quite a pleasant and reliable way of running Windows software on your Unix desktop, but CrossOver is known for putting many more tweaks on top of the features implemented in Wine, mostly to make popular office packages (Microsoft Office) and games work even better in emulated environment.

CrossOver Pro For Free

For one day only, October 28th 2008, you can go to the CodeWeavers website to request your free registration key for the professional version of their CrossOver software suite – either for Linux or Mac. These are fully functional serial keys for the pro version, technical support included.

The trick is that you need to have this key activated as soon as possible! Originally, you were only given time until midnight, but it is now promised that you’ll get another 48hours to activate your key, although free registration keys will stop after 23:59 PM Central Standard Time.

Wait no more – the main CodeWeavers website is already down due to traffic, but Free CrossOver Pro registration form is still available!

See also:

• CodeWeavers website
• CrossOver @ Wikipedia
• Wine HQ

Every week there’s a few announcements or articles which I find particularly interesting, and so I’ve decided to share them with you. I’m not a Unix guru (yet), but if any of the listed materials require further explanation – do feel free to ask and I’ll be glad to help.

Ubuntu 8.04.1 release

About a week ago, the first update to Ubuntu 8.04 was announced – Ubuntu 8.04.1 TLS. I have completed my experiment of using Ubuntu Hardy as my desktop OS a few weeks ago, and so haven’t upgraded yet – but I think this release is not so useful for anyone who’s been automatically updating their system – it’s just another milestone and a way to download a complete Ubuntu 8.04.1 as one image.

The highlights for me would be Firefox upgraded to the final 3.0 release and Gnome upgrade (it’s 2.22.2 in this release).

Gentoo Linux 2008.0 release

For some of you, it’s probably been a long-awaited release. Move to 2.6.24 kernel provided support for much more hardware, and this is bound to look good with the updated and much improved Gentoo installer.

Read more in the official Gentoo Linux 2008.0 announcement.

Cache poisoning vulnerability in DNS

Dan Kaminsky has found quite a nasty weakness in DNS implementations: deficiencies in the DNS protocol and common DNS implementations
facilitate DNS cache poisoning attacks.

Thanks to the seriousness of the problem and a great coordination, most of the vendors were given the time to publish a fix, so the Vulnerability Note VU#800113 contains a comprehensive list of vulnerable implementations of DNS (both server and client sides are affected, by the way!) and links to fixes provided by various vendors.

Whether you’re managing a server farm or just a Linux desktop – be sure to update!

Wine 1.1.1 release

Things are going much faster with Wine development after the 1.0 release – it didn’t take long for the 1.1 to appear, and now almost every other week brings another great update with tons of bugs fixed.

Wine 1.1.1 release includes more than 50 bugfixes and hundreds of changes since Wine 1.1.0, notably the fixes for Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Microsoft Office 2007 installers, as well as improved video playback and many other improvements.