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

Visual Basic drinking Wine

This tutorial is depreciated, please follow my new tutorial: visual basic 6 revisited – linux – wine
Visual Basic running on Fedora

Get past with your life on Windows, install Microsoft Visual Basic 6 on GNU/Linux with some good old wine…

  1. Install the required libs, etc.
    $ winetricks ddr=gdi vb6run gecko gdiplus fontfix d3dx9 corefonts mdac_typ dcom98
  2. From a working Windows XP installation, copy over riched20.dll, riched32.dll, urlmon.dll, oleaut32.dll, and hhctrl.ocx, from the system32 folder to your wine system32 folder
  3. In your Wine configuration dialog, under the Libraries tab,
    set the following files to native:
    hhctrl.ocx
    oleaut32
    riched20
    riched32
    urlmon
    And set these to builtin:
    ole32
    rpcrt4
  4. Do a fresh install of IE6 with ies4linux, click on Advanced and edit the downloads and the install prefix to make it totally compatible with your existing .wine directory.
  5. Then run the Visual Basic 6 installer, and if everything goes well, cd to .wine/drive_c/windows/system32 and execute “wine regsvr32 comcat.dll” and “wine regsvr32 MSSTDFMT.DLL”

And your done! Have fun with Visual Basic on Linux!

Tested with wine 1.1.38 and Fedora Constantine(F12)