Quickbooks Pro works on Corel Wine

[Herman Oosthuysen]

Quickbooks Pro works Purrrrrfectly on Corel Wine.  It looks good, works
good and prints good.  The only caveat is that when it is running, you
cannot launch Wordperfect as well - it is an either or situation.

Cheers,

Herman
http://www.AerospaceSoftware.com





Aerospace Software Ltd.

Phone: 403+241-8773, Fax: 403+241-8841
E-mail: Aerosoft at AerospaceSoftware.com, Web:
http://www.AerospaceSoftware.com
 
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How to install QuickBooks Pro on Linux

Herman Oosthuysen
10 May 2001


 
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General

QuickBooks Pro is a win32 program and requires the Wine interface to run
on
Linux.  The standard free version of Wine will allow it to run, but it
will
not be able to print.  The Corel version of Wine includes a font manager
and the required printer drivers, but it is not clear how to install a
Windows program under this version of Wine.

This document describes one way to shoehorn QuickBooks into the Corel
Wordperfect 2000 installation on Mandrake 7.2.  This crowbar and
sledgehammer installation method should work with most any Windows
program...

 
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Corel Office 2000 Basics

First install Wordperfect Office 2000 on your Linux PC.  In order to do
this, you may require special RPM installation scripts from the Corel
web
site.  The install scripts on the WP2000 CDROM are for Debian only and
do
not work on an RPM based system.

 
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QuickBooks Basics

To get Quickbooks installed, you have to first install it on a Windows
machine and register it with Intuit.  Then copy the whole installation
to
the Linux machine, Windows registry and all.  This way, the program is
fooled into thinking that it is still running on the original PC.  Wine
uses a text version of the Windows registry files, but adding the keys
to
that did not work, so I copied the binary registry file from Windows and
that worked.  Obviously you will run into a problem, the next time you
install a Windows program that also requires this registry file.

 
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Installation

Here are brief installation notes.  This assumes that you know what you
are
doing.  If not, give up now, don't bother to even try this, since a
million
things can go wrong and you need to know how to fix basic problems.

Copy the QuickBooks Pro files from c:\program files\intuit\quickbooks
pro\*.* to /usr/lib/corel/other/quickbookspro/*.*.

Copy the Windows registry file c:\windows\system.dat to
/usr/lib/corel/other/system/system.dat.  This will ensure that when
QuickBooks Pro starts up, it will find the registration code in what
Wine
fools it into thinking is the c:\windows directory, else it will
terminate
immediately.

Edit the script file /usr/lib/corel/bin/wpolauncher and add an entry for
quickbooks in the case $base structure, as well as in the if["$listapps"
=
"YES"] then structure.  Do the exact same changes to the script file
usr/bin/wpo2000-list.  These scripts launch all Corel applications and
we
are riding piggyback on the Corel installation.  This ensures that the
printer driver and fonts will work properly, without you having to do
any
additional configuration work.

Edit the configuration file /usr/lib/corel/etc/user.wpo2000/wine.conf
and
add a path in the [wine] path key to the quickbookspro binaries to allow
Wine to find the new application (;/usr/lib/corel/other/quickbookspro).

Create a set of link files to put QuickBooks on the KDE menu system.  In
directory /usr/bin create a link to the wpolauncher script.  This can be
done by copying the wordperfect script and renaming it to quickbookspro.
This is the name that the wpolauncher and wpo2000-list scripts look for
and
has to be the same, for things to work at all.

In directory usr/share/applink/ add a link to usr/bin/quickbookspro. 
This
can be done by copying the wpo2000.kdelnk file and renaming it to
quickbookspro.kdelnk or by using the KDE menu tool.  This will create a
link in the KDE menu system which will run usr/bin/quickbookspro and
launch
the program via the scripts wpolauncher and wpo2000-list.

You can test the installation by running Wine from the console.  This
way,
all the error and warning messages are visible.  Navigate to /usr/bin
and
run #./quattropro first, to see whether the Corel installation still
works.  You will see a million warnings and errors, but that is 'normal'
and if the spreadsheet runs, then try #./quickbooks.  If that also
works,
then select QuickBooks from the KDE menu.

 
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Have fun!

Herman