Running N3FJP Field Day Logger under Linux

Over the last year or so I've converted most of my computers from Windows to Linux, typically Linux Mint. For Field Day 2017 I attempted to get the wonderful N3FJP Field Day Logger running on my Mint laptop. I tried both the Mono route, as well as Wine. I installed all manner of software, and generally made a giant mess. In the end, it was a failure, and I reverted to logging on a separate Windows laptop.

This year, I had a spare afternoon ahead of Field Day and decided to give it another shot. I already had both Wine and WineTricks installed. I first used Wine to run the installer for the Field Day Logger, which installed, but promptly ran into errors. It failed to open the database file because a COM component was missing. Installing MDAC via WineTricks solved that issue.

$ winetricks mdac28

When I went to try again, I found something was wrong with the shortcut it had created for me under Menu -> Wine, so I removed it and created a new one with the Main Menu app. It looked something like this: 

env WINEPREFIX="/home/jason/.wine" wine C:\\Program\ Files\\N3FJP\ Software\ Affirmatech\\ARRL\ Field\ Day\ Contest\ Log\\FieldDay.exe

Now that I was able to launch it again, I found another error, related to OLE DB and ADO. After some mostly-fruitless searching, I managed to find the following which worked perfectly:

$ winetricks jet40

When you run it, you'll see a message at the end that dao2535.tlb" failed with error 1006 and installed file dao360.dll not found, however more research determined that these errors were specific to Jet's ability to access Excel Spreadsheets, and since we know the logger uses Access Databases for the backend, that will not be a problem.

At this point I was able to successfully launch the logger, enter some data, close it, reopen it, and see my saved data. I haven't had an opportunity to try network logging yet, but this is very encouraging. I wanted to get the details recorded before I forgot what I did.

EDIT:

After posting this, I discovered that one of the netbooks we use for logging that typically runs Windows 10, in fact had Raspbian installed on it. This afforded me the opportunity to set the logger up from scratch. Here's what I did:

$ sudo apt install wine winetricks
$ winetricks dotnet40
$ winetricks mdac28
$ winetricks jet40
$ wget http://n3fjp.com/programs/FIELDDAY.exe
$ wine FIELDDAY.exe

I ended up with two shortcuts on my desktop, one the non-functional .lnk which I deleted, and another which worked perfectly without any modifications needed. I was also able to test the TCP networking feature, using another Windows PC as the server. No apparent issues there either.