My changeover to Linux - Update

[ten0rman]

When Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP, I made the decision to transfer to Linux and made a couple of reports on TMF detailing my progress, bearing in mind that at that time I knew very little about Linux. The Linux distribution or “distro” I eventually chose was Linux Mint v13 with the Mate desktop. One of the reasons for choosing this distro was that it had Long Term Support (LTS) until April 2017. Since then I have become somewhat more proficient in Linux, and have recently upgraded from Mint 13 to Mint 18.1 (LTS to April 2021), still using Mate desktop, albeit an upgraded version. This report then, is essentially an update to those earlier reports.

I have to say that on the face of it, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the two versions although I have had a couple of hiccups with Mint 18.1 (see below). I do think that both my laptops are now running slightly slower, but given their age and specification, it is still acceptable. What will happen in 2021 is anyone’s guess. If I’m still here, I’ll be in my late 70’s: whether or not I will be capable of a further upgrade will depend not only on my state of health, but also on whether or not the laptops need upgrading.

Wine, & associated programs such as Winetricks, WineGecko, WineMono etc along with MFC42.dll

Wine is an interface program which tries to allow Win32bit programs to run under Linux. Like all programs, Wine is under continuous development. The default version for Mint 13 was Wine 1.4 which I found not particularly good, however, by upgrading Wine to 1.6 and then to 1.7 I found that I could get acceptable performance for my needs.

With the upgrade to Mint 18.1, I discovered that Wine had also been upgraded to 2.0, with a staging & development version at 2.2. I tried to upgrade to 2.0 but made a mistake due to not understanding what was going on and ended up using the staging version of Wine 2.2 instead. Fortunately, I then found that those problems I had previously been plagued with were very much reduced, so much so that one program which hitherto had been difficult to use became much more usable, albeit with some minor problems for which I could either easily find a workaround, or ignore.

There is a problem with Wine 2.2 in that on installation it removes all the additional programs such as WineMono etc, however on loading the first Win32bit program, Wine automatically detects that WineGecko & WineMono are missing and ask if the user wants them installing. It is recommended that the user does indeed allow their installation. Installation then continues satisfactorily. On attempting to run the Win32bit program, the installation may fail saying that, eg, MFC42.dll is missing. Now normally, Winetricks would be used to find and install this dll, but I cheated and copied from an existing Mint 13 installation. (FWIW, the installation is into a folder named syswow64.)

Paint Shop Pro 7.04 (PSP), Design Cad 2000 (DC2K), Design Cad 3D Max 17.2 (DC17), TaxCalc.

All these programs require the use of Wine. PSP has been dropped in favour of The Gimp, an open source program with much better facilities; TaxCalc has been dropped in favour of HMRC’s own online program (and thus saving £25 as well).

DC2K and DC17 are earlier and later versions of the same program. With Wine 1.4, DC17 was useless, whereas DC2k, although not perfect was usable. With Wine 1.6 & 1.7, DC2K was perfect but DC17 became better but still with a few problems which made usability debateable. With Wine 2.2, DC17 has become even better, still not 100%, but nevertheless very usable indeed.

Masterfile Professional (Mpro)
Mpro is a no longer supported DOS based relational database system which I have been using since 1993 for all our household expenditure. I have also been adding data from old passbooks etc with the result that I now have over 25000 records dating from 1961. Needless to say, I do not wish to lose this data, and indeed, I do not wish to stop using this program because despite is age, it admirably fulfills all my requirements, and, whatsmore, it has never failed.

Initially, the only method by which I could get the program to run was by the use of Virtual Box & Windows XP, but this was not satisfactory. With help from a contributor on TMF, I got it working satisfactorily under Mint 13 using DOSemu, a DOS emulator for Linux. With Mint 18.1 (& the earlier Mint 17.x) there was a problem in that one particular key (#) was not recognised. I think this may have been because DOSemu, under Mint 18.1 possibly defaults to the US keyboard because when I changed the relevant command in dosemu.conf to force it to use the UK keyboard, it all worked satisfactorily.

There is another problem in that with these later versions of Mint, the display font by DOSemu is rather coarse and bold, but since I was having difficulty, possibly due to old age, in reading the Mint 13 version, I have left it as is.

I also found that searching was slow, however there is a DOSemu command, speed, which works by stealing time slices from other running programs. By this means I increased the search speed for 23K records from 2 minutes to 7 seconds albeit with some delay to other running programs. Nevertheless, it was worth doing.

Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office Writer, Libre Office Calc.

All work as expected.

Networking

I run two computers, one for all my daily needs, and other for backup purposes. Under Mint 13 I had got home networking satisfactorily set up in that I could access either computer from the other computer and transfer files as required with full internet access. With Mint 18.1, I followed the same instructions that I think I used for Mint 13, only to find that whilst the local network was as required, I could not access anything outside of that network, neither the router nor the internet. I do not know what went wrong, but I found a way round it which works satisfactorily.

1. Set up each machine so that it can work as a server on the local network. This involves the installation of “ssh server”.
2. Set up the system such that each machine always uses the same IP on the local network. The guide that I initially used recommended setting each machine manually thus avoiding the use of DHCP. This, I think may be what was wrong, as what I eventually did was allow all machines to access the router, thus using DHCP as an initial step, but then within the router to ensure that the router always allocates that IP to that particular machine. I have a BT HomeHub5, and this is rather difficult to find, but it is there. What you have to do is to access the HomeHub, then under Advanced settings select Home Network, then click on the device concerned and near the bottom of the next screen will be found “Always use this IP address:”. Change from No to Yes and the job’s done.
3. From a File Manager screen (for Mint), one can select “Connect to Server” and follow the instructions to make a connection.

Once set up, it is possible then to create bookmarks which will allow access to the other machine(s) by a single click and insertion of the password.
I did find that although my two machines use ethernet connections via homeplugs, the same system can be made to work using wireless.

Conclusion.
Once set up, it all just works. So much so that when faced with a fresh start as I was with upgrading to Mint 18.1, the user can easily have forgotten how it was done the last time, especially if, as for me, it was three years ago. But really, it is easy. I may have an interest in doing it, but the rewards have been a system which well, does what it says on the tin (with apologies to Ronseal).

Regards,

ten0rman

[cinelli]

This is very useful. Thank you.

Cinelli