VFP

[dibl]

I'm amazed that you tried to run Visual FoxPro under Wine. Following the instructions of Paul McNett, who worked with Ed Leaf, I did that with Visual FoxPro 6.0 and was able to edit and compile one of my apps (as a test) under SuSE 6.4 and WINE. The only problem I had was with some of the controls on the executable which came out black. I couldn't resolve that problem and abandon the attempt. I am not sure McNeet or Leaf could either. But, it didn't matter. While Microsoft came out and said it was OK to run VFP under Linux, is was NOT OK to distribute your compiled ELF executables of your compiled VFP apps to run under Linux. That, a lawyer pointed out, was a violation of the US Anti-Trust laws because it tied an application to an OS. Now that kind of tie-in doesn't seem to bother the DOJ.

@GG, I'm no developer, but I believe my application is what you would call a compiled VFP application. Is is distributed as a product: http://www.whollygenes.com/Merchant2...mvc?screen=TMG


@motoburn, this is still mostly accurate: http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3095339.0

[GreyGeek]

Re: Install and run Windows based Shockwave/Flash *.exe

Yup, if you don't give the VFP developer to your clients (which would be illegal, if not expensive) then what you give them HAS to be an executable, along with distributable libraries.

Your app? Did you pay to have it created or did you buy the right outright?

[dibl]

Re: Install and run Windows based Shockwave/Flash *.exe

No, I bought a license from Wholly Genes (see ad in link above). I run it on my Win 7 VM. When I made my first Win XP VM, and installed the app on it, I benchmarked it, against an installation on a native Win XP (same hardware). On the VM, a file indexing/verfying function ran 5% slower than it did on the native Windows. I decided that was a very reasonable trade for the security and reliability of running the whole deal on a Linux OS. It's been that way ever since. 8)

[GreyGeek]

Re: Install and run Windows based Shockwave/Flash *.exe

VFP apps had some severe limitations, besides speed. The biggest problem was that originally we used our VFP apps on our LAN, but as state offices in other cities were established they needed access to our VFP apps. That's when we learned a hard truth about VFP DBs. When your client requests a record, say one with the last name of "SMITH", in stead of just retrieving that record from the database, the app pulls the entire database passed the client until it sees the one with the "SMITH" record. When someone in an office 100 miles away from Lincoln fires up the Homestead app via a T1 line to Lincoln and it begins by displaying the first record in the file, it took the VFP app a full five minutes to become ready. And each time they searched for another record it would take another 5 minutes. Our homestead and, more importantly to the out-state employees, the payroll applications were too slow to be of practical use except in the Lincoln office.

That led us to Oracle, where only the records you ask for are retrieved, not the entire table. It was like being in Lincoln running the app, even if you were in North Platte, 200 miles west.

[dibl]

Re: Install and run Windows based Shockwave/Flash *.exe

I can certainly confirm that MS VFP is a serious resource hog. I've got my X6800 overclocked to 3.45GHz, and with 2 GB of RAM for the VM, it still takes 5+ minutes to run indexing. As far as I can tell, it's strictly PIO-limited through one CPU core, so the only way I'll ever make it go faster is to run a faster CPU. Which is why I'm eyeballing the i7 930 ....

[GreyGeek]

Re: Install and run Windows based Shockwave/Flash *.exe

What about rack mounting a cluster of them and running Linux as a super computer on them. That should speed up VFP a bit.

Wanting to run an application faster just reminded me of the Mandelbrot software I wrote on my Apple ][ using UCSD Pascal. It would take about 30-40 minutes to compute a complete Mandelbrot graphic. Click on a spot to zoom in and another 30-40 minutes would sail by. I wasted a whole day just zooming in on a single chaos picture.

Xaos, the Fractal zoomer in the repository can do at least 15-20 of those graphs per second, making the zoom in fluid, like flowing water. This Sony VAIO notebook must be at least a 50,000 times faster than my old Apple ][+

[dibl]

Re: Install and run Windows based Shockwave/Flash *.exe

It would take about 30-40 minutes to compute a complete Mandelbrot graphic. Click on a spot to zoom in and another 30-40 minutes would sail by. I wasted a whole day just zooming in on a single chaos picture.

Flight Simulator on my Commodore 64 was a little better than that, but I recall my WW I biplane doing some real slow-mo maneuvers while dodging the Red Baron.

Yes, I intend to build a new system, around an i7 930 with 6GB of RAM and a SATA 6GB controller and a WD drive (or maybe a SSD) that will pick up the pace a little. The older I get, and the better the software gets, the less patience I have with the hardware .....