[Wine] WIne, Access 97 and mysql question/problem

[Daniel Kasak]

On Mon, 2009-03-16 at 15:07 -0500, wpflum wrote:

> I'm trying to get Access 97 running under wine and have it connect to a
>  mysql server running on the linux side of the machine.  I was able to
>  get Access 97 installed and it runs good but no matter what I do I
>  cannot get it to connect to the mysql server through the odbc
>  connector.

OK firstly, I don't know that you're going to get acceptable results out
of Wine and Access. I dedicated quite a bit of time to this at my
previous job, and ended up deciding it wasn't going to be stable enough.
At the time I was trying both the open-source wine and CrossOver Office.
If you don't have access to a Windows system, it might *just* be OK for
exporting your data, copying some VB code out, making screenshots of
query designs, etc, but I would *strongly* advise against using in a
production environment.

Secondly, the *only* connector I got going successfully was
MyODBC-3.51.12. They changed something shortly after this which broke
compatibility with wine / crossover, as far as I could tell. From memory
I needed MSDAC-2.6 ( Microsoft Data Access Components ), but this could
have been more to do with my code that MyODBC ... can't remember.

Shameless plug alert ...

What I eventually did ( after investigating OpenOffice, Kylix and
Rekally ) was to write myself some Perl classes to manage recordsets and
bind them to Gtk2 widgets ( you build the UI in Glade, which is a GUI
editor for Gtk2 apps ). This ended up being far more successful than I
ever imagined it would be, and now I have a number of large production
systems running on it. All the classes are open-source and
cross-platform ( installed on 50% linux, 50% windows 2000 desktops ),
and available from cpan or on my website:
http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/ ( there are some screenshots of
production systems there somewhere ).

I'm also working on a GUI builder for setting everything up, but it's on
the backburner as I have a 7-month old baby and he's taking up *all* my
free time.

Anyway if you're looking to get a database front-end going on Linux,
this is how I'd do it. Sure you have to rebuild your GUI ( yeah ... and
code ), but you pick up some very nice advantages along the way. Gtk2 is
a much nicer toolkit than Access' limited widget set - you get dynamic
resizing of widgets / forms, a *real* MVC treeview widget, themable
interface, etc. Also Perl is a much nicer language than VB :) And it's
all cross-platform, which is a much better solution in the long term
that trying to get Access running under Wine, and then stop MAD ( Mad
Access Disease ) and the endless cycle of crash, compact & repair,
crash, compact & repair ... ... ... I'm sure you know what I mean.

Dan