[AccessD] Linux Server

Hi all, and a merry 2009 to you.

Both of Karen's options are valid (as is her comment on the techies).

Further information:
a) wine is (essentially) the same product as Crossover.  Crossover is a 
commercial fork of wine deliberately concentrating on MS Office support.  
However, there is a slight weakness in both as Gustav has just pointed out.  
It is focussed on providing end use of the Office software, not "server" 
capability.  IOW, its very good at Word, Excel etc etc and provides full 
display manager to file system facilities via linux implementations of the 
necessary o/s and application libraries.  There is plenty of net information 
on wine.

b) Having said that.  There is at least one perfect implementation of this 
sort of thing that I know of.  Its a UML tool called "Enterprise Architect" 
from SparxSystems. (http://www.sparxsystems.com/) They have a "port" of their 
application for linux available for Crossover.  I have used this with little 
implementation or configuration problems.

c) The VM method is certainly viable and I have done this myself (on a limited 
basis as a trial) using various linux VMs.

d) An alternative option not yet mentioned is using a non-Access back end such 
as MySQL or postgreSQL and accessing the BE via ODBC.  This I have done many 
times as I have a test management application that I use at my client's that 
uses a central db (on my companies linux servers).  In fact the db has been 
up and running for around three and a half years now and I have used it with 
every MS Windows and Access version since XP.  My personal preference is for 
postgrSQL as it seems to give better performance.

Why the techie's would not mention these is beyond me?

hth
bruce

p.s.  The reason you guys don't hear from me much these days is that I am now 
running a 100% linux based "shop" - currently 5 servers and one management 
client behind a LAMP (actually LAPP) layer and a linux firewall group.




On Saturday 03 January 2009 04:41:16 Karen Rosenstiel wrote:
> There's a Linux product called WINE to run Windows products on Linux. I'm
> surprised your customer's techies don't know about it. It's been around
> quite a while.
>
> http://www.winehq.org/download/  Also has Crossover.
>
> Or they could run Windows as a virtual machine on Linux.
>
>
>
>
> Karen Rosenstiel
> Seattle WA USA
> -----Original Message-----
> From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
> [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of
> rusty.hammond at cpiqpc.com
> Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 9:30 AM
> To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com
> Subject: Re: [AccessD] Linux Server
>
> I'm not that familiar with Linux but there's a product called Samba
> (samba.org) that runs on Linux and allows it to be a file and print server
> to MS workstations.  Would that not work to host the Access backend?
>
8x<