Aerospace Software Ltd.

Wine Shoehorn Howto

I first got QuickBooks to run on Corel Linux about 5 years ago and was probably the first person in the world to accomplish this feat. Following the demise of Corel Linux, I repeated the exercise on Mandrake Linux 8.1.

Things have improved tremendously since and nowadays, QuickBooks installs perfectly well on CrossOver Office. However, this guide still serves to show how to shoehorn a reluctant program into Wine or CrossOver Office, so I reworked it a bit and changed the name to suit. Hopefully, this guide will be useful to someone, somewhere, losing his hair over a recalcitrant Windows program.

Codeweavers' Wine Installation

If you find that a program won't install on Wine or CrossOver Office the regular way, then all is not necessarily lost. You can install the program on a Windows PC and try to transfer the installed system to the Linux system and see if it works. If it does, then you can easily replicate the installation onto other Linux machines by turning the whole into a tar archive.

First install QuickBooks Pro on a Windoze PC and register it. You can use Windows98 or WindowsME for this purpose - no need to fork over a big wad of dough for WindowsXP. Then uninstall your regular copy of Wine, since it is likely outdated and finally do some shoehorning:

Get Codeweaver's wine from http://www.codeweavers.com and install it.
Copy \Program Files\Intuit to /home/username/.wine/fake_windows/Program Files/Intuit to get the basic program on Linux.
Copy \Windows\Intuit\Shared\*.* to /home/username/.wine/fake_windows/Program Files/Intuit/QuickBooks Pro/ to get the rest of the DLLs on Linux.
Copy the registry files \Windows\user.dat and \Windows\system.dat to /home/username/.wine/fake_windows/windows, to ensure that QB will find the registration key.

Change directory to QuickBooks Pro and launch QB:

$ cd "/home/username/.wine/fake_windows/Program Files/Intuit/QuickBooks Pro"
$ wine qbw32.exe

QuickBooks should now function, though I still had some problems at this point, with font issues and 'No Printer Installed' for Windoze. CUPS printers should be detected automagically. If not, then run wine as:

$ wine -debugmsg +winspool qbw32.exe

and look at the output. Something like this may show up: "Wine cannot find certain functions that it needs inside the FreeType font library. To enable Wine to use TrueType fonts please upgrade FreeType to at least version 2.0.5. http://www.freetype.org

Install FreeType

Actually, there was nothing wrong with FreeType on Mandrake 8.x, it was just installed in a brain dead manner, but while you are at it, you can just as well get the latest version. Of course now with Mandrake 10.x, these problems are long forgotten - still, the following may be useful to someone.

Download the source and unpack it as root:

#tar -zxvf freetype-2.1.1.tar.gz

Enable hinting:

open the file "include/freetype/config/ftoption.h"
open the file "include/freetype/config/ftoption.h"
locate a line that says: #undef TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER
change it to: #define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER

of course, this must be done _before_ compiling the library

Verify that you have only one version of freetype:

Certain recent Linux distributions will install _several_ versions of FreeType on your system. For example, on a fresh Mandrake 8.2 system, you can find the following files.

/usr/lib/libfreetype.so which links to /usr/lib/libfreetype.6.1.0.so and
/usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.so which links to /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.6.0.so

If you fetch the latest FreeType of their website and install it, it will go into /usr/local/lib - duh...

Use links to resolve these issues if required, so that there is only ONE real version of FreeType. Change all the links in /usr/X11R6/lib and /usr/lib to point to /usr/local/lib/libfreetype.so.6.3.1 and get rid of /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.6.0.so and all other older libs.

When FreeType is installed on your system, type:

$freetype-config --prefix

This should return the installation path. Put a link to the library there so that Wine (and other programs) can find FreeType, wherever they happen to go look for it. This may need some perseverance.

Now do the usual GCC SW build thing:

# ./configure
# make
# make install

on the command line to configure, build and install FreeType on your system. Note that the default installation path is "/usr/local/lib".

Restart the font server, with "service xfs restart"

Codeweavers' CrossOver Office Installation

Purchase a copy of Codeweavers' CrossOver Office: Goto http://www.codeweavers.com and purchase a downloadable copy. The file is named install-crossover-office-1.1.0.sh

Make it executable and run it as a user to install:

$ chmod 777 install-crossover-office-1.1.0.sh
$ ./install-crossover-office-1.1.0.sh

Copy the Intuit directory from the other version of wine to:
"/home/username/cxoffice/support/dotwine/fake_windows/Program Files"

Copy the windows registry files user.dat and system.dat with the QB installation key from the other version of wine to /home/username/cxoffice/support/dotwine/fake_windows/Windows

Change directory to the new QB directory:

$ cd "home/username/cxoffice/support/dotwine/fake_windows/Program Files/Intuit/QuickBooks Pro"

and launch wine:

$ /home/username/cxoffice/bin/wine qbw32.exe

QB should now work and you should be able to print on the default printer.

Post Mortem

I have been using QuickBooks on Linux for several years without any serious hiccups and the only remaining irritation is that I can't get QuickTax to work, but I only use that once a year. Maybe this document inspires someone to create a QuickTax on Wine Howto guide...

'Hope this helps!
Herman