visual basic 6 revisited – linux – wine

Earlier this year, I had written an article on running Visual Basic 6 on linux under wine, this is an update for it, the prior one is deprecated

Getting Visual Basic 6 to work on linux is pretty easy, not much trouble, all the basic things work, as of what I’ve tested.

Here’s how you get that damn thing to work:

Copy over the contents of OS/SYSTEM/ from the CD root to your wine system32 directory

$ cp -r /media/cdrom/OS/SYSTEM/* ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/

Since we are only concerned about Visual Basic 6, copy over the folder VB98 from the CD root to your Program Files

$ cp -r /media/cdrom/VB98/ ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/
# for the sake of convenience, let's rename this folder as Visual Basic 6
$ mv ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/VB98/ ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Visual\ Basic\ 6/

Register the two dynamically linked libraries essential to run Visual Basic 6 smoothly

$ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/
$ wine regsvr32 comcat.dll
$ wine regsvr32 MSSTDFMT.DLL

Easy, eh? Your all done, now, let’s create an optional launch command with the following contents
File: vbasic

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Visual\ Basic\ 6/
wine VB6.EXE

Make our launcher executable and place it in the right place

$ chmod +x vbasic
# following command must be issued as root
$ mv vbasic /usr/local/bin/

Now you can just issue the command vbasic, and all should work well, using this launcher, you can create entries for your panel, etc.

Deployed with a fresh install of wine version 1.2-rc2