Visual FoxPo under Wine HQ

[Ojai Guy]

For what it is worth, I have been able to run Visual FoxPro 5 IDE under Wine 6 without any apparent problems. I am not a professional programmer so my demands on the software I write are rather tame. I have not been able to yet get VFP 9 to install as the installation requires .net which apparently is not handled by wine. Any suggestions to remedy this problem would be appreciated.
It was a shocker for Microsoft to end support for this program, as I found it to be the easiest, most effective way to write database software programs. I guess they(MS) have to make an incredibly good living.

 

[Chris Miller]

Have you even tried? AFAIK the installation of vfp9 starts with a VFP9.HTA, that's an HTML application, I don't think that needs .NET, it might just be something special Wine didn't yet care about emulating. You can also start the setup.exe, which doesn't care for prerequisites installation, but installs the core VFP9 itself. The only actual requirement is Windows Installer. Not sure if 3 or 4, but surely an older version than the current one. I don't think this older version of Windows Installer has .NET dependencies.

Well, and if that still fails even under Windows you can also not use the setup but copy over a VFP9 installation directory and then do a few steps to get things going. One thing missing is MSXML2.DOMDOCUMENT.4.0 for task pane, dito the common controls (OLE/ACtiveX). On a new Windows computer, you could find the installations for MSXML3 and MSXML4. Also an installation of common controls. Not sure you get all of that done on Wine if setups of these components still fail.

But even without these additional components, the VFP9 IDE can already start after just copying the installation dir. So you can start vfp9.exe and DO VFP9CLEAN.APP.

Not sure what this covers, it might fix file associations or not. If not, you may use this:

https://www.berezniker.com/content/...ile-associations-open-files-one-vfp-instance.

That's just for the comfort of opening VFP by "starting" a PJX, or a DBF, etc.

Not sure how far the Windows registry is fully emulated but you might even be able to start VFP9.exe with the /regserver command option, so it registers itself. Again, not a required step, just one more point in having the same state as after a full installation.

What remains is getting help to start at F1, but you can always just start dv_foxgelp.chm, if Wine support chm help. I guess it does. IIRC Will Hentzen pointed out Wine as an alternative basis for using VFP without Windows a decade or almost two ago. It just was and is a legal grey zone and AFAIK he got in trouble for that matter with MS.



Chriss

 

[Chris Miller]

Maybe also copy over the VFP runtimes you find in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VFP, just for ease of having them at hand to build a setup for your EXEs. Also some of the VFP related merge modules in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Merge Modules.

Chriss

 

[Mike Gagnon]

We had installed VFP6 on Wine with success but the installation failed when trying to install VFP7 because wine does not support .NET



If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ184-2483 first.

 

[Chris Miller]

I wonder why, but then the alternative of copying an installation is still on the table.

From

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/released-versions-of-windows-installer

I conclude Windows Installer 4 was sufficient to install VFP9 and 3.1 should be sufficient to install VFP7, if there already is a later but incomplete emulation of the Windows Installer feature, as a standard component of the OS, you might still get it going by getting an older version of Installer installed.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/windows-installer-redistributables

lists redistributable packages of the Installer.

They should by themselves not depend on Windows Installer present, but might use an older version of that, themselves, no idea. And this all might fail on other dependencies. But worth a try, isn't it? First update Wine to have the Installer 4 or 3.1 and then try installing VFP7 or 8 or 9 the normal way.


Chriss

 

[Chris Miller]

Just looked into what others are doing to get .net working on wine, as it's such a standard, today, that Wine without any dotnet framework component seems impossible to use for anything.

There you go:

https://superuser.com/questions/476872/installing-net-4-0-framework-on-wine-using-winetricks

The major hint is on winetricks. That component seems to enable a bit more than just the native Wine.

Chriss

 

[Mike Lewis]

I won't try to add anything to the technical issues discussed above. But I will point out that there have been legal issues about running VFP under Linux or other Unix derivatives. I don't know if these will be relevant here, but it is something you might want to look into.

A couple of references:

thread184-1800958

MS legal threat derails Foxpro on Linux demo

Mike

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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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