* Mac/WINE Users - Family Historian 5

[mjashby]

Valkrider and any other Crossover/WINE users,

I'm attempting to put together a step-by-step guide to installing Family Historian using the Wineskin front-end programme (and possibly Winebottler), which are both somewhat different to the commercial Crossover product, but produce a similar end result, i.e. a largely functional and very usable 'Mac OS X version' of Family Historian. The one major(?) flaw seems to be that FH narrative reports don't display correctly on screen, although they can be previewed/printed/saved.

I already have produced fully functional (as far as I know and have tested) copies of FH Versions 2, 3 and 4 using Wineskin and each of these correctly displays narrative reports on screen, so I have been attempting to identify what critical program changes were introduced that could have produced the display problem in Version 5. I have narrowed these changes down to:

a) Lua Plug-ins/programming facilities introduced; and
b) for the first time, Microsoft Visual FoxPro OLE DB Provider and vfpoledb.dll appeared in the Family Historian installation files.

I can't see that the inclusion of the Lua programming language could impact on the onscreen display of reports, especially as the vast majority of created Plug-ins seem to work without problems. However, in reading some of the Microfoft information information on Visual FoxPro 9 I found the following:

"Reporting System Features. Extensible new output architecture provides precision control of report data output and formatting. Design with multiple detail banding, text rotation, and report chaining. Output reports supported include in XML, HTML, image formats, and customizable multi-page print preview window. Backward compatible with existing Visual FoxPro reports."

This suggests that the move to the use of the Visual FoxPro and the FoxPro runtime (for whatever reason) may be the culprit.

I haven't found anything significant on the WineHQ site relating to programmes that have a dependency on the Visual FoxPro runtime. Nor have I seen any possible solution that I can test in Winetricks; and as I'm not a Crossover user I can't test out my theory there.

Question: Would any Crossover user be willing to broach this with them?

If this is 'the problem' and there is no solution, then we may simply have to hope (in the absence of a native Mac version of Family Historian) that FoxPro dependencies are deprecated in a future release of Family Historian. Perhaps, as Microsoft's end-of-life support for Visual Foxpro goes the way of Windows XP in early 2015 we can live in hope! After all, the long-standing dependence on Foxpro seems to have played a significant part in the recently announced demise of The Master Genealogist.

Mervyn

[Valkrider]

Mervyn

I am a licenced Crossover user but am away on holiday at the moment with only my laptop with me.

I will raise a support call with them later this week when I am back at home and have my licence details available.

[mjashby]

Colin,

Thanks. It would be good to know if this is the likely 'problem', whether or not there is a solution.

Mervyn

[tatewise]

I suspect the FoxPro runtime is purely to support the direct import of The Master Genealogist databases.
This feature was added in FH V5 and is quite independent from Report creation, which may well have been redesigned in FH V5 along with the introduction of Books.

[mjashby]

Mike,

Good point. I didn't link the appearance of FoxPro to the TMG import facility - never needed to use it; and I forgot about the addition of Books as a significant new feature in Version 5. Should have re-read 'what changed' instead of relying on (fading) memory.

Looks like I'm back to the drawing board on the few features that don't work in a Mac 'conversion'!

Mervyn

[tatewise]

The FH problems in Crossover (and it would seem Wineskin) are now relatively minor niggles.
Calico Pie have stated they are keen that FH should run well under Crossover/Wine and is something they plan to look into as soon as they can make time to do so.
So maybe it would be best to wait for the next version of FH.