[Wine] Re: VB on Linux with Wine

[Dan Kegel]

On 1/12/06, Raghu <raghu.jonnalagadda at cmcltd.com> wrote:
> I downloaded vbrun60sp5.exe from MS site and installed the VB runtime
> under Wine. Now, how do I go about running my vb application that is
> using MS SQL Express/MS Access.

First off, let's make sure your expectations are realistic.
You should expect to run into many problems that will take
real effort to resolve.  This will not work on the first try.
If your company wants to support your fifty VB6 applications
on Linux using Wine, you should expect to have to work through
at least one Wine bug per application.  Each bug will probably take
at least one programmer-day to fix.  You may have to wait for others
to fix bugs in Wine and/or pay somebody to fix bugs in Wine.
The payoff will be a suite of applications that work well on Linux,
and perhaps earn your company millions of dollars.

If you're ok with all that, then let's proceed.

What version of Access are you using?  Probably Access 97, right?
What version of Wine do you have installed?
What's your role at your company -- are you a VB/Access developer yourself,
or are you testing apps written by others, or both?

You should probably start by installing Access '97 and trying to
write a trivial test program.
I just now installed Office '97 Professional on a fresh copy of Wine-0.9.5.
Here's how I did it:

1. In winecfg,  set 'win98' emulation (otherwise Wine defaults to Win2K)
2. Wine's COM/OLE support is not complete, so at the moment you
have to install Microsoft's DCOM98.  This is a temporary workaround.
Here's how:
 2a. In winecfg, click the 'Libraries' tab,
        in the "New override for library" field, type 'ole32' and click 'add',
        In the "Existing overrides" list, select ole32 and click 'edit',
        in the "Edit Overrides" popup, click "Native (Windows)" and click 'OK'
        click "OK" to leave winecfg.
 2b. Download dcom98.exe from http://www.microsoft.com/com/ and run it with Wine
3. Insert the Office 97 cd-rom and run its setup.exe with wine
4. Finally, navigate down to the install directory and run
MSACCESS.EXE with Wine.
The Access UI should pop up.

I haven't tried any Access apps myself; I'm not an Access developer.  But
I'll try to run my wife's movie database (done in Access '97) under
wine sometime
soon, and see what problems that exposes.

You will probably run into some problems.  For instance, here's one:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3909
You should start testing your apps with Wine and filing bugs reports
at http://bugs.winehq.org so we can start looking at the problems.

Some of the problems you run into will be hard to fix.  They will be
fixed eventually by volunteers or by the professionals at Codeweavers.
The people who want Access support in Wine have collectively pledged $6000 so
far to encourage Codeweavers to work on it; see
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/
If your company wants to see Wine support Access properly, you might consider
pledging a significant amount; see
http://www.codeweavers.com/site/compatibility/browse/name?app_id=186;pledge=1
or, if you're in a hurry, directly hiring Codeweavers to get one of
your apps running.

Good luck!
- Dan
--
Wine for Windows ISVs: http://kegel.com/wine/isv