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Wine Software

CrossOver Office 5 and Wine 0.9 Released 212

Posted by CmdrTaco from the gotta-keep-'em-emulated dept.
Jeremy White writes "I am happy to report that we have shipped version 5 of CrossOver Office. The most user visible changes are support for Office 2003 and 'bottles' which lets you deploy Windows applications more easily than ever. But under the hood, this release includes all of the major work that went into the 0.9 release of Wine, which also shipped today and is now officially in Beta."
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CrossOver Office 5 and Wine 0.9 Released More

CrossOver Office 5 and Wine 0.9 Released

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  • This release is an important milestone for both teams and goes one step forward in allowing Linux (MacOS users soon) to run any Windows program perfectly.

    • Re:Congrads to Codeweavers and the WineHG Team! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:02AM (#13871878)
      I would rather see important apps ported to Linux. If there is so much demand for Wine/Crossover, then surely there is demand for the apps natively on linux? Ask your vendors where they are.

      • Re:Congrads to Codeweavers and the WineHG Team! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by saur2004 ( 801688 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:08AM (#13871927)
        Actually I can understand not wanting to bear the cost of two lines of developement. I wouldnt mind if they simply came out and officially said they would support users trying to run under wine.
      • Yes, please call Microsoft and see what they say.

        I think Wine is a Good Thing, and I think porting FLOSS applications to Windows is a Good Thing. Both approaches provide a conduit for gradual transition away from proprietary operating systems, and that is a Good Thing.

        Of course, developing true cross-platform applications is the best, but that's not always so easy with regard to legacy applications.
      • "Ask your vendors where they are."

        Done that.

        Answer 1: Bought off by Microsoft; there used to be Wordperfect and Coreldraw for Linux. Where are they now? Microsoft "invested" $50 million in Corel and dropped Photodraw 2 (a great product and a real threat to CorelDraw), for which Corel sold off Corel Linux and dropped all Linux development efforts. ($50 million? just chump change to Microsoft.)

        Answer 2: Not answering up; IBM, an alleged supporter of Open Source Software, has consistantly failed to answer call
      • WINE does help with porting. The winelib and various tools mean it's possible to port a lot of Win32 code, compiling it with gcc, linking to winelib and run it natively on Linux. The (large) flies in the ointment is that a lot of code uses ATL or MFC which may or may not compile on Linux or may or may not be legal to compile on non-MS platforms.

        It would be a useful companion project to WINE & MingW to see open source versions of ATL & MFC. I would guess that this would be a fraught process since t

      • They are busy supporting their money making market, their windows users.

        1% of their users that want a linux native version wont get many companies to allocate the resources. its just not cost effective.
      • Whether a need will be met depends on the perceived benefits to the potential suppliers.

        Sure, within the Linux community, there's a fair amount of demand, and the money to be made is apparently significant enough to CodeWeavers for them to do the work in supplying.

        However, most of the apps people need to run are going to come from the big companies like Microsoft, Adobe, etc. The money to be made from porting their software directly to Linux is simply not significant enough for them to bother doing the wor

    • one step forward in allowing Linux (MacOS users soon) toto run any Windows program perfectly.

      WTF? Even WIndows can't run Windows programs perfectly. One of the big problems of mimicing Windows is getting all the bugs to work "right" (what a concept).

      I think I'll dress my computer up celebrate Hallowe'en - I'll put a Windows Install CD on top of it (as opposed to when I want to punish it, I put the install cd in the CD tray and threaten to close the tray)

      Then I'll tell it "quit yer Wine-ing"

  • RPM? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by baldass_newbie ( 136609 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:00AM (#13871862) Homepage Journal
    Finally, CrossOver Office Professional has the ability to create an RPM package out of a bottle. This service allows you to create a bottle on one system, package it up, reinstall it on many additional machines, or simply upload it to the server holding your RPMs thus automating the installation of the Windows applications. This is by far the easiest way to deploy a set of Windows applications on a large network.

    What about .TGZs or .DEBs?

    • Re:RPM? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rovitotv ( 65942 )
      In the past you have been able to tar the cxoffice and
      ".cxoffice" directory and move the entire installation to another machine. I am not sure what it means to make an RPM package out of a bottle but if I was installing cxoffice on several different machines I would tarball the cxoffice directories and copy to the other machines. Done.

      • Re:RPM? (Score:5, Informative)

        by fgouget ( 925644 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:41PM (#13872696)
        > In the past you have been able to tar the cxoffice and ".cxoffice" directory
        > and move the entire installation to another machine.
        [...]

        This still works and much better than ever before.
        You probably remember that when you simply tarred and restored the .cxoffice directory from one machine to the other you were losing the menus and file associations. Then you had to go into CrossOver Setup and manually recreate each of them.
        Now all you have to do is run the following command and all the KDE / Gnome menus, file associations and browser plugins will be recreated:

        ~/cxoffice/bin/cxbottle --bottle win98 --install

        The point of turning a bottle into an RPM is that there are tools that will automatically 'push' RPM packages to a bunch of machines. Big companies usually use such tools. So now all they have to do is generate an RPM, upload it to their server, and what you did above for one machine will happen automatically for their 200, 400 or more desktop computers.

    • Re:RPM? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:15AM (#13871991)
      Yeah, and you know what else kills me: you don't actually get any wine from these "bottles" - that just makes me want to complain and complain about all the other things they don't do.

      But then some kind person smacks me and I realize that instead of complaining I should take note that what's shaping up here is a system for running Windows apps that's better than Windows itself! There is no Windows box that lets you run IE5 and IE6 side by side, and this is actually a rather practical thing to do if you're a developer. Also, I'll make a bet that Wine will do a better and more consistent job of running old Windows binaries than will Vista when it's finally released. This really is going to make an important difference for the future of consumer Linux and OSX.

      • Re:RPM? (Score:5, Informative)

        by /ASCII ( 86998 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:03PM (#13872403) Homepage
        There is no Windows box that lets you run IE5 and IE6 side by side, and this is actually a rather practical thing to do if you're a developer.
        Sure there is. When I was doing web development a few years ago, we has a 'wayback machine' that had Win95, Win98 and WinME and various versions of IE from 3.0 upward, all using VMware. Granted, this seems less resource intensive and easier to set up, but it has been _possible_ to do this for a long time.

      • Re:RPM? (Score:4, Informative)

        by fean ( 212516 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:07PM (#13872436) Homepage
        Actually, for the record, you can run IE 4, 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 6.eolas, and 7 all on one box....

        check out QuirksMode Multiple IE [quirksmode.org]
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • "There is no Windows box that lets you run IE5 and IE6 side by side."
            Sure there is. It's called VMWare. Or Microsoft Virtual PC if you prefer.

          Having to emulate an entire PC is obviously not the same as running the two applications side by side on the same operating system.
      • There is no Windows box that lets you run IE5 and IE6 side by side, and this is actually a rather practical thing to do if you're a developer.

        Are you sure [skyzyx.com]?

    • I, too, am curious about this.

    • Re:RPM? (Score:4, Informative)

      by IANAAC ( 692242 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:00PM (#13872372)
      What about .TGZs or .DEBs?

      Had you actually chosen to purchase, you'd know that all those formats are available.

    • Re:RPM? (Score:2, Informative)

      by fgouget ( 925644 )
      > > Finally, CrossOver Office Professional has the ability to create an RPM
      > > package out of a bottle.
      [...]
      > What about .TGZs or .DEBs?

      Tgz are supported too.
      Just click on the 'Archive' button in the bottle manager. This will create a '.cxarchive' file which you can simply rename to '.tgz' if that's what you prefer. Then to install that file, click on the 'Restore archived bottle' button, browse to select the archive and that's it!

      Alternately, on the command line you would do:

  • Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by brad-x ( 566807 ) <brad@brad-x.com> on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:01AM (#13871870) Homepage
    I was hoping Outlook 2003 would be among the Office 2003 applications supported, as it's one of the most popular. Oh well. Nice to see WINE advancing as a platform though. Keep up the good work!
    • Me too. Outlook 2003 was the single most important thing I was waiting for in this release! I'll buy 5.0 to help support the work, but I am very disappointed.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)

      by jeremy_white ( 598942 ) * on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:28AM (#13872087) Homepage
      Yeah, we wanted to as well. Sadly, it needs wire compatible DCOM in order to work properly, and we just weren't going to get that done. We decided it was a mistake to hold up the whole release just for Outlook. We're going to go after Outlook next and hope to have it out 'soon'. Cheers, Jeremy
      • I'm trying to find out if access 2003, or at least the 2003 runtime, is working. The codeweavers site seems to be experiancing, um, difficulties.
      • Luckily, I don't need (or want) Outlook in my life. I do however need Lotus Notes. I've been using the Codeweavers version for years to get this, and love it. The only major drawback was that the "new mail" notification popped up in its own window and stole focus. (Very annoying)

        This latest version fixed it! It's right in the system tray where it belongs! Yay!

        I can't thank the development team enough. Crossover Office is crucial for getting my work done everyday, and is the only software I have e

      • Sorry for coming in late to the party!

        Congratulations to you, Jeremy, Alexandre and the rest of the team.

        About Bottles; I've been following Wine's exploits since about 1998. Though Linux as a platform and Wine as a project were both at humble beginnings at that time, I felt that these tools would become the most powerful and efficient ways of computing eventually because they are both better at managing chaos than Windows-whatever-version will EVER be.

        I think it shows through in the development model.
        Gentle
    • I'm still waiting for reliable serial support. I was the lead in implementing the OS and software on an embedded system to use in a critical[1] environment and was going to use GNU/Linux as opposed to MS Windows. The required software was a Windows only application and with a little tweaking ran fine and stable under Wine. However, the COM ports would not work. They could receive data but not transmit. A search on Google revealed others with similar problems and potential patches but with a strict dead

  • Thanks Wine! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tpgp ( 48001 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:01AM (#13871871) Homepage

    From the linked article:
    I look forward to the day when we can say with some confidence that Linux is nearly completely Windows compatible.

    heh - how many qualifications can you have in one sentence?

    Seriously - thanks to the codeweavers guys (for contributing to wine) and especially to the wine/winelib projects for offering an upgrade path that doesn't mean cutting windows from your system in one step.

     

  • What I'd like to see... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by /ASCII ( 86998 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:04AM (#13871892) Homepage
    What I'd like to see in Wine is a version that uses GTK for painting, so that Wine apps would integrate nicely with GTK apps. Right now, Wine apps look like something the cat dragged in. As I understand it, work is underway to implement Windows themeing, but that is not what I's like to see, since it still wouldn't make Wine apps look like other X apps. Oh well. Maybe someone will implement a Windows theme that uses GTK for performing drawing operations, that should at least improve the situation a bit.

    • Right now, Wine apps look like something the cat dragged in

      Do your bit for Windows compatibility!

      "Right now, Wine apps look like something the type dragged in".

    • Yes, theming support is being added to Wine, and a GTK+ bridge is planned (but nobody started it yet).

      Crossover uses a different (nicer, I think) colour scheme which is more reminiscent of Windows XP or 2000.

    • Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mad Merlin ( 837387 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:14AM (#13871979) Homepage
      Using GTK for Wine would be totally opposite to it's goals. While it might be nice for some things, it means that it's no longer possible to have exact Windows compatibility -- you'll be putting more and more hacks in to make things work, rather than actually reimplementing the Win32 API, like they have thus far. Overall, it might make 30% of applications look nicer, but it might break the other 70%, what do you think is more important?
      • You're saying that it is impossible to implement one API as a wrapper around another. That is bogus. There are versions of both QT and GTK that are wrappers around the Windows API. I know that the windows API calls are lower-level than QT, but it is _not_ impossible to make wrappers in that direction either. Quite the opposite, if Wine had been based on GTK, I suspect it would have had less bugs by now, not more.
        • No, it's not impossible, it's just a losing battle. Windows programs have to be *Windows* compatible, not *Wine* compatible, thus Wine tries to do everything *exactly* like Windows does. That's not feasible if you're mapping to Qt or GTK, because they're drastically different toolkits compared to Win32.
          • You are ignoring the fact that there are pretty high quality wrappers in the other direction. Both QT and GTK apps run just fine under Windows. GTK programs have weird, ugly open/save dialogs, and a few GTK widgets don't actually rely on the native widget, but overall they work much _better_ than Windows programs work in Wine.
            • Qt is designed from the ground up as a multiplatform library, GTK is similar, Win32 is not. You have the source for GTK/Qt and the vast majority of programs that use them, you don't have the source for either Win32 or most Win32 programs. Like I said before, it's not impossible to do, but it's a losing battle. Especially when Microsoft is scared stiff of people running Windows programs perfectly in Wine, but they can't break their own APIs, because that would hurt both them and Wine equally, but if Wine doe

              • You have the source for GTK/Qt and the vast majority of programs that use them, you don't have the source for either Win32 or most Win32 programs.

                Um hello? Are't we talking about WINE here? You know, the source rewrite of Win32 wrapped over POSIX apis? The source code is there.

                There's absolutely no reason why WIN32 applications run under WINE can't be made to look like GTK apps (as long as the apps use COMCTL rather than their own custom controls like quicktime win32 or opera win32 does
                • If you read any of my many comments in this thread, I agreed and said that using uxtheme to change the look of applications (exactly like Windows does) is a viable method for achieving applications that *look* like GTK applications. What isn't viable, and what was originally suggested, is to use GTK in Wine to get that effect. I've explained several times already in this thread why using GTK in Wine is a bad idea.
      • Using GTK for painting is not opposite to its goals at all. In fact Windows XP ships with a theme engine called uxtheme.dll which is called by Win32, the new common controls, and of course apps like Java and Firefox. It has methods such as DrawThemeBackground, DrawThemeEdge and so on. Why shouldn't it be hooked up to GTK and its own engine? If the WINE implementation called the GTK (or QT) theme engine, it would mean that any app using uxtheme.dll to draw a button would immediately gain a native appearance
        • Partial implementation of uxtheme.dll is done, and yes it can be used when it is done, but (correct me if I'm wrong), it only affects the look of applications, not the behaviour. GTK behaves differently than Win32 does. Win32 can do all sorts of crazy things that GTK can't do, and the converse applies too. The fact remains that Wine has to be able to do all those crazy things, so you're either going to a) have a GTK looking app that doesn't behave like a GTK app (more feasible, using uxtheme), or b) have a
          • Basically, you can make it look like GTK, but you can't make it GTK

            True, but that's the same for Firefox, OpenOffice and Java too. Firefox and OpenOffice look like a GTK / Aqua / XP application but they're not. Java Swing apps only look like a GTK / Aqua / XP application but they're not.

            But at the end of the day, the look is the most distinctive cue. The differences in the "feel" of XP and GTK are minimal. In fact, I can't think of a substantial difference between the two. They have similar widgets, sim

    • since it still wouldn't make Wine apps look like other X apps.

      What is the X app look ? AFAIK, there is no such thing.
      There are at least a dozen of toolkits (like gtk, qt, gnustep, wxwidgets, tcl/tk...), each one with its own look.
      A true X app looks like... what ? xfig ?

  • Bottles are terrific! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:15AM (#13871990) Homepage
    One of the problems that I have found most annoying about Wine is the fact that everything always seemed to require so much tweaking and tuning and adjusting, not to mention manually sorting out DLLs that need to be copied and all of that stuff. The problem I hated the most was the installation! I'm not a genius and I don't have the time and patience I once did for this sort of thing. It's cool as hell when it works though. And such was my experience when I first installed MSIE6 on my FedoraCore4 laptop. I went to a website (follow this link here [tatanka.com.br]) that provided a script that performed the whole installation in one step... well almost one step -- I needed to install a cab extraction utility first... and I already had the RPM for Wine installed at the time. But my point was that it was SO simple and direct.

    I don't really care to use MSIE... but I can if I really need to. :) And I didn't know it was a "bottle" at the time but now I realize it must be because it created its own "Windows" install in the process.

    I feel like eventually, just about any application will have some sort of bottle available for installation. This is a terrific development and a huge hurdle when it comes to deployment of Linux on the desktop where we still have those "legacy Windows apps" that we can't do without.
    • How hard is it to make bottles?

      I'd like to use eMule without having to boot Windows, so I can watch Rome and Weeds. (*) (-: Yes, yes, no need to tell me that it would have been less embarassing to admit to d/l animal p.rn, or something! :-)

      I would prefer not to have to learn anything about the registry.

      (*)Is there a season 2 of Weeds coming?


    • Pay the $40 for the professional packaging of crossover. You get so much and it is super easy to set up and install.

      You get a nice gui that leads you through installation. A lot of software is available online (fonts, plugins, wordviewer, etc), so the script automagically downloads and installs it for you. For office, you have to install just like anything else on windows.

      It even gets the right mime-types so mozilla opens word attachments in crossover office.

      Well worth $40. I have not had to do any stra
  • Does anybody have some links and/or tips on getting World of Warcraft working for Wine? I've managed to get the install done, but the app freezes when I try to start it up.

    This was on an older version, so maybe I'll give 0.9 a shot tonight....

  • Office 97/Wni98? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by julesh ( 229690 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:17AM (#13872009)
    For example, Microsoft Office 2003 only works on Windows versions 2000 or later, whereas Microsoft Office 97 runs best in a bottle that emulates Windows 98.

    I've had no problem running office 97 on Microsoft's Win2K or XP. Is this a problem with Wine's implementation of those platforms, or a problem with Office I haven't encountered?
    • I think they were saying not that it won't run, but that it runs better in the native environment.

      Presumably, this is a problem neither you nor I have run into. :)

    • I did a recent XP update and office 97 preview view started crapping out on me for large presentations, like office was completely hung. Well-hung you might say.

      Wine continued to work just fine. So now I have to do my ppt development on linux and ship it to a XP laptop for presentations...

  • Direct link to a torrent of the demo (Score:5, Informative)

    by jeremy_white ( 598942 ) * on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:22AM (#13872045) Homepage
    Hmm. Our new ISP isn't doing as well as we'd have liked; our servers are humming along at a very mild load limit, but we seem to be throttled out of the ISP (seems like it always takes one /. post to iron out the kinks at an ISP :-/).

    So, here's a direct link to the demo torrent [codeweavers.com].

    Enjoy!

  • "bottles" could be a big, BIG deal (Score:4, Interesting)

    by starseeker ( 141897 ) * on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:23AM (#13872053) Homepage
    As far as I can tell, what they are calling "bottles" is simply storing a "per application" Windows environment. Hopefully this will be implemented in Wine too, because it has tremendous possibilities. Configuration tweaks needed for each application can be bundled with its windows environment, conflicting applications that even a real Windows box couldn't run on the same machine could be made to work... amazing. Instead of hunting for an install CD for a 10 year old application, you could could just copy and paste the virtual Windows environment to another machine or off of a backup CD. No fuss, no missing install keys - it would all be there.

    This might someday make Wine not just a way to migrate from Windows to Linux but a way to keep alive old Windows programs that have had all source code and other relevent information lost. Take the old Windows box, copy the binaries over to a Linux wine install, copy over whatever files and settings the application needs when you test it, make a copy of the old Windows hard drive in case you missed something, and you now have not just an old application stuck on a single unmaintainable machine but a "program in a box" scenario. Much worse than having a properly maintained program of course, but a way to keep vital software working much longer than would otherwise be possible. (Yes, I know - disk image mirrors and other proper backups and record storage can also be a big help, but things like that don't always go as planned.)
    • As far as I can tell, what they are calling "bottles" is simply storing a "per application" Windows environment. Hopefully this will be implemented in Wine too, because it has tremendous possibilities.

      Actually, this is in Wine already. It's called $WINEPREFIX, and can be used like: WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.ies4linux/ie5 wine "C:\\Program\ Files\\Internet\ Explorer\\IEXPLORE.EXE" $@

  • Perfect Timing!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by karlandtanya ( 601084 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:25AM (#13872071)
    I downloaded the previous version last night. ...
    over my 21.6k dialup. ...
  • I've always been disappointed when upgrading wine - some things will be fixed, but other things that were working perfectly well with the older version will now be broken. Does the change in versioning mark an end to that? Here's hoping...

  • Autocad Support (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mdproctor ( 74927 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:43AM (#13872229) Homepage
    Any one know if support for the latest Autocad has been added and if it hasn't what are the difficult areas there. I imagine CAD studios on win32, already being semi-technical with a history of cad applications workign on unix, are a sweet spot for conversion.

  • Quickbooks? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nlinecomputers ( 602059 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @11:44AM (#13872239)
    Does it have support for Quickbooks? That is my make or break app for dropping Windows all together. I've tried it in the past but menus would get mucked up and you can't run the updater which is required if you are going to download tax tables.

    Tried to check out site for info but it's slashdotted.

    • Re:Quickbooks? (Score:3, Informative)

      by jeremy_white ( 598942 ) *
      Well, we use CrossOver to run Quickbooks 2000, and versions up through 2004 are officially supported.

      However, that support is fairly new, so we don't tend to recommend that people move all their books solely to CrossOver; that would be crazy (okay, so we're crazy [grin]).

      And yes, the server is slow. We're working on it. The server is up; if you wait 15-20 seconds, the pages do come up. Just takes it a bit.

      Cheers,

      Jeremy

      • Thanks. What about the two issued I mentioned? The icons tend to get mucked up and you can only click on them if you know what they are from memory. And how to you update? My version is 2002(about to be dropped - damn greedy Intuit pigs) and the update program is seperate from QB. I never could get it to work.

        • Re:Quickbooks? (Score:3, Informative)

          by jeremy_white ( 598942 ) *
          The icon issue was fixed back before 4.2 shipped; have you tested since then?

          Updates I'm not so sure about; we just did it via the online tool and it worked, but we haven't tested (or triaged anyway) all the versions to make sure they all worked.

          Cheers,

          Jeremy

      • What about Quicken? I tried to get Quicken Deluxe 2003 to work in wine once, but utterly failed. I've since upgraded to Quicken Deluxe 2005. If I could get that to run in Wine, I'd be a happy person.

        Alternately, if I could find an open source alternative, I'd also be happy. GnuCash doesn't cut it... I need something that works almost identically to Quicken (account, categories, budgeting, etc) and also does online updates (the one step update stuff).

  • utterly slashdotted? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cypherz ( 155664 ) *
    I started downloading the new release about 5 minutes before this story left the mysterious future... when it did, my download speed went down to 2.8 KB/s.

    I other news: My boss is getting serious about rolling out Linux desktops here. He asked me today for a "prototype" for his desk. Crossover Office is gonna be a big part of our company's desktop transition.
    We only have about 150 - 200 desktop users, and our M$ tithe is still about 40 or 50 kilodollars per year. Getting off the upgrade treadmill is going

  • WINE could be the biggest reason... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by macserv ( 701681 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:19PM (#13872529)
    ... that Intel-based Macs are a good idea. Now that there's an x86 processor in their boxen, Apple could do for WINE what it did for X11: integrate it well with the OS, and ship it as part of Mac OS X. Double-click an app, and it just runs.

    The "bottles" concept makes it even better, and could work well with Mac OS X's existing heuristics for bundling and resource handling.

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