Strange issue with Visual FoxPro 6 on Wine

Questions about Wine on Linux
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taylorkh
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Strange issue with Visual FoxPro 6 on Wine

Post by taylorkh »

Visual FoxPro when used interactively is an interpreted language. It pseudo-compiles the code from a .PRG file to a .FRX file and executes the second one (at least that is my understanding.) It is a handy data related super scripting tool. At least that is how I use the product and have used the Xbase language since dBase II on CP/M. That said...

Visual Studio 6 will not install on Linux/Wine - at least I have never accomplished that. I copied the Vfp98 directory from a working Windows XP install to C:\Program Files\ in the ~/.wine hierarchy. It has worked reasonably well on several Ubuntu versions and for the last 9 years on CentOS 6. I have not worried about file associations, fonts etc. which do not work the same as a native Windows install as I can get by. And then I moved to CentOS 7.

CentOS 7 is "strictly" 64 bit. I had to build the 32 bit version of Wine and install it which I did successfully. I have a couple of other old Windows programs which work fine. Visual FoxPro 6 loads OK, I can open, create, browse and modify tables. I can run queries, print reports etc. The problem comes when I attempt to run a newly created .PRG file. For example, the command

Code: Select all

locate for vin = m.vin and tax_year = "2013" 
produces the error

Code: Select all

locaor vin =in = m.vin and tax_year = "2013" 
Error in line 26: Unrecognized command verb.
The syntax is correct and I can run the command interactively with no problem. However, when run from a .PRG file it does not work. The error file seems to show that the syntax has been garbled. I see this same gibberish in the .FXP file. The .FXP file created on CentOS 6 contains little readable material as shown below

Code: Select all

..............N...5.....................<...............(........D.J......................G.....F......Q...activity...S...^.....F....
.Q...dor.&.o......................dor.1...vins...F......#)...~.......^....F......-......
.............2013.	....%.F6........J.F...k.(.
.	....J.F.
.k.(.
......J.F...k.(.
.
........-......
.............2014.	....%.F6...K....J.F...k.(.
......J.F.
.k.(.
......J.F...k.(.
..........-......
.............2015.	....%.F6........J.F...k.(.
......J.F.
.k.(.
......J.F...k.(.
The same Vfp98 directory, same source code and data files etc. run fine on CentOS 6 with Wine 1.8.6.
It does not work on CentOS 7 with Wine 1.8, Xubuntu 16.04 32bit with Wine 1.6.2 nor on Ubuntu Mate 16.04 (32 nor 64 bit - did not write down the Wine version). I am at a loss. Any suggestions?

TiA,

Ken
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Bob Wya
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Re: Strange issue with Visual FoxPro 6 on Wine

Post by Bob Wya »

taylorkh wrote: ...
It does not work on CentOS 7 with Wine 1.8, Xubuntu 16.04 32bit with Wine 1.6.2 nor on Ubuntu Mate 16.04 (32 nor 64 bit - did not write down the Wine version). I am at a loss. Any suggestions?
For starters - strictly speaking none of the those versions of Wine are supported any more.
Officially supported Wine versions are in the 2.x (development) and 2.0.x (stable) branches now.

Ubuntu Mate 16.04.2 is reasonable base to test your software with. But you cannot realistically expect support for an obsolete version of Wine. Wine version 1.6.2 was released in January 2014!!

You would need to install the WineHQ PPA - see WineHQ: Ubuntu ...
I'd recommend testing both the development (2.10) and stable (2.0.1) branches of Wine.

It hasn't gone unnoticed that you like old software... :wink:
But sometimes the lack of major back-ported bug fixes - does hold up Wine stable (it only receives a trickle of back-ports - a few cherry picked patches - to each minor version release).

I cannot comment on the current state of Visual Studio 6 ...
But that AppDB page - has some hints from older versions of Wine - that often can be a good starting point - if a straight install fails in a clean 32-bit WINEPREFIX set to Windows XP.

I cannot really recommend RHEL / CentOS as a basis for running Wine - though they might make great Server OS(s)...
IMHO Debian / Ubuntu support for Wine is bad enough (lack of multilib development libraries and shipping of obsolete versions)!! :roll:

Bob
taylorkh
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Re: Strange issue with Visual FoxPro 6 on Wine

Post by taylorkh »

Thanks Bob Wya,

The versions installed are what was in the repositories of the various distros. I was curious about the older version withXubuntu. I only installed it a couple of days ago - just as a test. Let me setup a clean Ubuntu 16.04 install and add wine from the WineHQ PPA. I will update this thread with my results.

I DO like older software. If it works, why break it :mrgreen: The oldest thing I am running is an expense tracking app I wrote in dBaseII on CP/M back in the mid 1980s. It was originally designed to collect sales tax data so I did not have to go through a box of receipts at the end of the year to calculate what I could deduct on my income tax. All I had to do was to run a report and I had my documentation and a grand total. I used it I think used it for two years and then they did away with the sales tax deduction. I removed that field and kept collecting the data.

In 2005 my (previous) employer decided to offer an early retirement buyout program. While most of my fellow employees ran around like a bunch of headless chickens trying to figure out if they could afford to retire I simply ran some analysis against my 20 years of data - and hit the door. That application, recompiled long ago in FoxPro for DOS ran on CentOS 6 with DOSemu and runs fine in DOSBox on CentOS 7.

As for CentOS... I started dabbling with Red Hat Linux 5.2. By time it got to 8.0 I had managed to setup a file and print server. After the split between RHEL and Fedora I used Fedora Core up to about 5 I think. I found an iso file of Ubuntu 6.x on Usenet of all places. I read about it some and decided to try it. I liked the fact that when it came across an unknown file type it would offer to find a program to access the file rather than say "contact your system administrator" who was me :(

By Ubuntu 8.04 LTS I was using Linux almost full time. PCs and a server. In 2009 I purchased a high end Dell PC. 8.04 would not recognize some of the new hardware so I installed 9.10. Worked great and I was able to configure my two monitors as separate X screens - almost like having two independent PCs. 10.04 when it came out would not support that configuration thus my move to CentOS 6. CentOS 7 did at one time support the video configuration but it or Mate or something does not any longer. Neither does any 'buntu I have tried. I am used to the Hat way of doing things so I will probably stick with CentOS for the foreseeable future - at least on my workstation and servers.

Thanks again,

Ken
taylorkh
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Re: Strange issue with Visual FoxPro 6 on Wine

Post by taylorkh »

I posted a somewhat wordy reply which I guess is awaiting moderation(?) Anyhow, following Bob's kind advise I built a VMWare virtual machine with Ubuntu 16.04 (Mate) and installed Wine 2.01 stable from the PPA. I copied my FoxPro installation to the VM and my data. Works fine. The bizarre error is gone.

I guess I need to see if I can install FoxPro from the Visual Studio media rather than just transplanting it. I also need to see if I can get a newer version on CentOS 7 (for reasons explained in my prior post).

Ken
taylorkh
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Re: Strange issue with Visual FoxPro 6 on Wine

Post by taylorkh »

For my next trick I tried installing Wine 32 bit by following the instructions/script on this page https://www.systutorials.com/239913/ins ... -centos-7/. By default it installed 1.8.5 which had the bizarre FoxPro issue described in the original post. I then modified the script and installed Wine 2.0. This did not fix the issue. 2.0.1 source is in the form of a .zx file instead of a .bz2 so I will have to modify the script some more or do the build manually. 2.0.1 solved the FoxPro issue on Ubuntu. Hopefully it will do so on CentOS 7 as well. I will update when I have some results.

Ken

p.s. Moderator - do ALL posts have to be approved or will I be able to post directly after making some number of posts?
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Bob Wya
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Re: Strange issue with Visual FoxPro 6 on Wine

Post by Bob Wya »

taylorkh wrote:I posted a somewhat wordy reply which I guess is awaiting moderation(?) Anyhow, following Bob's kind advise I built a VMWare virtual machine with Ubuntu 16.04 (Mate) and installed Wine 2.01 stable from the PPA. I copied my FoxPro installation to the VM and my data. Works fine. The bizarre error is gone.

I guess I need to see if I can install FoxPro from the Visual Studio media rather than just transplanting it. I also need to see if I can get a newer version on CentOS 7 (for reasons explained in my prior post).

Ken
Ha, ha Ken,

Lots of history there! I cut my teeth - originally programming Z80 Assembler on the ZX Spectrum - in the 1980's.
In recent years, re my enthusiasm for the Linux platform... I came up through the Mandrake and later Ubuntu route...
Now I run Gentoo and Arch mainly. 8)

I believe that Xfce is one the only main Desktop Environments that supports dual-head X Sessions.
Obviously tiling Window Managers - would probably also work in this regard...

I like the workflow of KDE - I mainly use the Plasma 5 Desktop - but the KDE Desktop hasn't supported dual-head X Sessions since KDE 3... :cry:

I'll play around and see if I can get Visual Studio 6 Pro to install cleanly... Not holding out much hope really...
Older software doesn't get much attention - from Wine developers.

Bob

Btw i think you need to get over 5 WineHQ Forum posts to stop them being moderated. Spambot issues... :roll:
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dimesio
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Re: Strange issue with Visual FoxPro 6 on Wine

Post by dimesio »

Bob Wya wrote: Btw i think you need to get over 5 WineHQ Forum posts to stop them being moderated.
It's three.
taylorkh
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Re: Strange issue with Visual FoxPro 6 on Wine

Post by taylorkh »

Thanks dimesio - I guess I am legal now :D

Thanks again Bob,

My first computer experience was Fortran 4 on an RCA Spectrum 70 "mainframe" in engineering school - 1971. Punched cards and the thing had the computing power of a modern digital wrist watch. When we learned about arrays in class I decided to create one, compute the incremental results of a numerical integration into the cells and then sum up the cells. Sounded like a reasonable learning exercise. I dimensioned a a 1000 x 1000 array at the start of my program. It came back with a 9xx error. A large sign over the window where you handed in your cards said that anyone receiving a 900 series error was to take it IMMEDIATELY to the computer center director (to see what you broke). Sheepishly I carried a print out of my code and the error page to the director. She looked at it and laughed. The computer could not handle a million cell array. Try 10 by 10 she said :mrgreen:

Moving on to today... I just completed my 2.0.1 build on a CentOS 7 virtual machine. I am installing Gecko etc. and will try my FoxPro example in a minute. I built the thing with the default Gnome3 desktop. What a POS. I think I would use Windoze 8 before Gnome3. They had to put a LOT of work into making it aggravating and hard to use to actually accomplish anything.

My initial attempt to run the test program on Wine 2.0.1 on CentOS 7 - same issue :(

At least now I have a fallback. I can run an Ubuntu 16.04 virtual machine for any FoxPro work. The task I had been working on when this started was to analyze some data I got (after almost a year) from the North Carolina Department of Revenue regarding county property tax on antique vehicles. The county bumped the "tax value" of my 1980 MGB from $800 to $10,800 in 2016 as it was now considered an "antique." Actually that change in classification happened in 2015 - 35 years from date of manufacture. On the other hand, my neighbor's 1971 Chevy truck was bumped up to $13,500 in 2016. It became an antique in 2007.

It appeared that the county began aggressively revaluing old vehicles in 2016 although they denied it. All said and done the data I got from the state was useless. I put a "historic vehicle" license plate on my MG which costs $10 per year. By state law that revalues the car to $500 which results in a tax bill of less than $4.

Enough computing for the moment. I have to replace the ignition switch in my 1983 John Deere tractor which is sitting in the middle of the yard with a full tank of weed killer which I was spraying over the weekend when it conked out. At least IT is not computerized :lol:

Thanks again,

Ken
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