Ubuntu 12.04 LTS WiNE, Outlook, Thunderbird, & RM2000

[Matt-Home of Electronics]

Hello, all!

I am not entirely sure if this is the right place to post this question. Also, I am new to the Technibble forums (I have been a member for a while, but have not done much, if any posting).

Anyway, I have a client that is a small Bottled Spring Water Delivery company and they use this program called RM2000 (Route Manager 2000). They have waited a little too long to switch from Windows XP, and they have decided to move to a Linux flavor called Zorin OS 6.4 LTS, which is based off of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but has a special feature called the Zorin Look Changer, which allows it to mimic Windows 2000, XP, 7, Ubuntu, Mac OSX, etc. They wanted help to do this, and I have found that the program works perfectly well in WiNE, but the program requires Outlook in order to e-Mail their statements (which really only recently became popular with many of their customers). It does have a feature to e-Mail to an SMTP server, but it does not work in WiNE or in regular Windows, and the company wants $1000 to upgrade them to a newer version where that was fixed. I remember being able to install Outlook 2007 successfully in WiNE before, but I can't get it to work now. I was also wondering, is there any way to make Thunderbird Mail appear like Outlook to an app, so that it would use it instead? Any suggestions?

Thank You,
Matt, at Home Of Electronics

 

[Markverhyden]

Free Zorin is limited from what I have seen. So you may have dependencies to address. Also winehq shows Ubuntu 13 working.

Personally I tried the Zorin, can't remember if it was LTS or not, with a neighbor who did not have her recovery disks for her HP. She did not like it but I did not try any of the other "look like Windoze" features.

As far as using a different email client. Hard to say. I would look through any .ini, etc text based config files to see if there is something there.

Can't help but ask. Did you try installing it on W7 or do they just want to get rid of Windoze all together?

 

[smashedbotatos]

Office 2007 will most definitely work with Wine and cross over office. It is a little slow to load, but it will work. The way I do it is copy the contents of the Office 2007 disk to a folder and install that way.

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=4992
Use Wine 1.5 or 1.6 If you can, and install with winetricks. It should install fonts and work perfectly.

 

[coffee]

I think it sounds like this company screwed up a bit. They should stick with windows and follow the upgrade path - IMHO. It really sounds like this company is trying to take the cheap road and try and get by. But this is just going to cause them alot of headaches.

They should spend the money and just have you upgrade them. Otherwise, You will probably be stopping back alot to fix things and they could start blaming you for their ills.

Dont get me wrong, Iam a great fan of linux over windows but only in the proper place. I dont think this will work out well for them in this situation. They should just follow the upgrade path and spend the money.

Sorry I couldnt be more help.

coffee

 

[Megaarch]

I think it sounds like this company screwed up a bit. They should stick with windows and follow the upgrade path - IMHO. It really sounds like this company is trying to take the cheap road and try and get by. But this is just going to cause them alot of headaches.

They should spend the money and just have you upgrade them. Otherwise, You will probably be stopping back alot to fix things and they could start blaming you for their ills.

Dont get me wrong, Iam a great fan of linux over windows but only in the proper place. I dont think this will work out well for them in this situation. They should just follow the upgrade path and spend the money.

Sorry I couldnt be more help.

coffee

Agreed

 

[colonydata]

I think it sounds like this company screwed up a bit. They should stick with windows and follow the upgrade path - IMHO. It really sounds like this company is trying to take the cheap road and try and get by. But this is just going to cause them alot of headaches.

They should spend the money and just have you upgrade them. Otherwise, You will probably be stopping back alot to fix things and they could start blaming you for their ills.

Dont get me wrong, Iam a great fan of linux over windows but only in the proper place. I dont think this will work out well for them in this situation. They should just follow the upgrade path and spend the money.

Sorry I couldnt be more help.

coffee

amen, and just so you know if this goes wrong. they are going to blame you, regardless of if it wasn't your idea to start with.

 

[codegreen]

You know whaat runs Outlook even better than WINE? Windows 7. Is there a reason why they can't just upgrade to Win 7 and continue running their current version of the route management software?

 

[BrentfromZulu]

I think it sounds like this company screwed up a bit. They should stick with windows and follow the upgrade path - IMHO. It really sounds like this company is trying to take the cheap road and try and get by. But this is just going to cause them alot of headaches.

They should spend the money and just have you upgrade them. Otherwise, You will probably be stopping back alot to fix things and they could start blaming you for their ills.

Dont get me wrong, Iam a great fan of linux over windows but only in the proper place. I dont think this will work out well for them in this situation. They should just follow the upgrade path and spend the money.

Sorry I couldnt be more help.

coffee

As I was reading this, I thought they should just slowly move to Windows 7/8. It looks like they are trying to take a shortcut.

I would strongly say make them stick to Windows. The "cost savings" will be lost when they keep hiring you to reapply band-aids

 

[altrenda]

These kinds of things make me nervous. There are many good reasons to switch to Linux, but strictly to save money even though your Line of Business applications won't run properly isn't one of them. Imagine if they handled maintenance on their delivery trucks this way.

As has been said before, going down the wrong road with a customer is going to be a lot of headaches, including a lot of unpaid support hours fixing things that aren't your fault.

To me, you've got 3 choices - convince them to do it the right way, go down this uncharted road with little support and unknown problems, or run.

 

[Matt-Home of Electronics]

Okay. I think I need to add some extra details to this.

To answer the last post I saw, the program will not even start (it gets even further IN WiNE!) in Windows 7/8, but I plan to try it on (ugh) Vista. Also, to answer an earlier post, which has been quoted many times, the owner is my Dad, who seems very pleased with Zorin on his personal machines, and he keeps saying that he won't blame me if it didn't work, since he knows how long I have worked on it. Also, I managed to get Outlook working again, and the program to recognize it, but now we are having other errors. We had a tech support guy at RM2000 who said he was willing to help us try to make it work on RM2000, even without paying for a $5,000 support plan. Unfortunately, he is a new trainee, so we haven't heard from him in a while, since he is in training, and probably doesn't know much about the program yet. And just recently, a flaky salesman, who had told us a while ago that we shouldn't try it on Linux, said that he would try to help us, but he knows almost nothing tech related. And, guess what... The SMTP server error happened to him, on Windows 7, using the latest version!!!

Thank You all for your help,
Matt, at Home of Electronics

P. S. Does anyone know of another company that makes Route Accounting software? Any price is fine, and we only need it for one (or two, for a backup) pc's. Preferably one that DOES support Linux, whether they support Debian/Ubuntu or RedHat/Fedora, they are willing to learn.

P. P. S. To answer a post that I saw after I posted this, they are not paying me, they are my parents.

 

[Matt-Home of Electronics]

Here's another update.

I dug through my basement full of old computers (it's a slow day) and found the one that Outlook worked on. It even had RM2000 on it still! I have been experimenting with it for a while, which is why I said in my last post that we have run into other errors. But, while testing on the newer machine, none of those errors happened! So, on one machine, the RM2000 program has several errors, but Outlook installs and e-Mails just fine. On the other machine, I can't get RM2000 to recognise Outlook, and I can barely get outlook to install, but RM2000 has absolutely no errors (except for the SMTP server thing). I did find out that the old PC (with working Outlook) has WiNE 1.7.x, and the new (with working RM2000) has WiNE 1.6.x. Also, the old one is a Dell Optiplex SX280, upgraded with 4GB RAM. New is a custom with 1GB RAM (other than that, specs are nearly the same). If I can get Outlook on this, and get the program to recognise it, this might work. I know and agree that this Linux might not be the best solution for this situation (there are not many situations like that), but that is what they want to do (they HATE Microsoft), and I hate giving up, and if I do, it will be bugging me until next year!

Sorry to hit you guys so hard with this situation as my first post. I have come here a lot, but this is my first post because someone has usually already asked the question that I had, and I always Google or search the forum extensively before I would ask.

Thank You,
Matt, at Home of Electronics

 

[Matt-Home of Electronics]

Thank You all for your help!
As it turns out, the program works okay on Vista, so they have gone to that.

 

[colonydata]

Thank You all for your help!
As it turns out, the program works okay on Vista, so they have gone to that.

Never in a million years would I say that Vista is the better solution. But in this case I believe it is.

 

[jr866gooner]

I think it sounds like this company screwed up a bit. They should stick with windows and follow the upgrade path - IMHO. It really sounds like this company is trying to take the cheap road and try and get by. But this is just going to cause them alot of headaches.



They should spend the money and just have you upgrade them. Otherwise, You will probably be stopping back alot to fix things and they could start blaming you for their ills.



Dont get me wrong, Iam a great fan of linux over windows but only in the proper place. I dont think this will work out well for them in this situation. They should just follow the upgrade path and spend the money.



Sorry I couldnt be more help.



coffee

100% agree, so many times I see companies either hold on too long and complain they need to upgrade even when told all along. Or they pay a little bit to just scrape by and hope it will work and complain anyway! May as we'll pay a bit more to have a better guarantee of successful working!