Just starting in Linux

[Guest_imported]

Hi,

Im thinking of switching over to Linux. Will microsoft office (including Access) work on Linux. Also I have a copy of visual studio with visual basic 6.0, will this work ? How about ODBC ?

j

 

[DumTech]

That's sort of difficult to answer...

On one hand, no. Microsoft software simply doesn't run under Linux. BUT, with WINE (

http://www.codeweavers.com/home/)

you may be able to run the Windows software you need to use. WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a compatibility layer library for the Windows API (or something like that).

Win4Lin is another option (

http://www.netraverse.com/products/index.php)

that may work for you. I've seen some software that refuses to run under WINE work with the Win4Lin demo, but I believe it also requires installing Windows.

I know nothing about Visual Studio/VBasic...

But as for ODBC, there's a Unix ODBC that, I imagine, would do what you need.

Sun's StarOffice is a suitable replacement for MS Office. I even have my wife using it at home... If you're doing Windows development work though, Windows might be the best environment for you. Why are you considering the switch? What will you need your Linux system to be capable of? Matt
matt@paperlove.org
If I can help, I will.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Visual Studio is not likely to be any use to you in linux. You could maybe get it to run under wine but I'm not sure what the point would be as it only creates windows executables which themselves would need to run under wine. However, there is a subset of VBA known as StarBasic that comes with StarOffice (

http://api.openoffice.org/basic/man/tutorial/tutorial.pdf)

. There are also some 'm$/windows' gui development tools for linux which can make transition easier, most notably kylix which is very similar to delphi -->

http://www.borland.com/kylix/

and omnis studio -->

http://www.omnis-software.com/products/studio/index.html

.

In general, the thing to do is move away as far as possible from M$ products and find opensource alternatives. There's probably not a lot of point if you are going to want to run all existing M$ apps. You can find all the functionality of Office with the exception of Access perhaps. However, you'd be much better off using a 'proper' database like postgresql or mysql anyway so thats no great loss.

Regards