From: Folderol on
Does anyone here know if Sage (line 50) runs under wine, and/or what
limitations there are?

--
Will J G
From: Tim Clark on
In article <20100809192248.58e8e1e4(a)debian>,
Folderol <folderol(a)ukfsn.org> writes:
> Does anyone here know if Sage (line 50) runs under wine, and/or what
> limitations there are?
>

A slight tangent here. I nver tried running it under wine, but it will
probably depend on the version - the earlier ones didn't do anything very
special.

Instead I have much experience of using a Linux server to hold the network
fileserver for Microsoft Windows 98 and XP clients running Sage Line 50. Sage
really hammers the filestore, reading all through several of the files - which
soon grow pretty large - before it's prepared to do anything. It means that
having a client Sage Line 50 remote from the fileserver is usually a bad idea.

When I ran it for a company split across two separate sites, with the Sage
filestore at one site, the only sensible way to run it was to have a spare
PC at that site which the remote site could VNC into (proprietary equivalents
would work too.)

I always thought the right way to go would be to use Linux file servers at
each site configured effectively in some sort of RAID mirroring arrangement
(sorry, the correct name escapes me at the moment), such that each server
could service read requests from its local copy, and write requests were
rapidly duplicated to the other location over the Internet.

I didn't get very far along that path before the company split and so we only
had one location to worry about. So I turned my attention to decoding the Sage
Line 50 format files, and in the end had several Perl scripts running on the
Linux server which went through the Line 50 files after close of business,
analysing the contents, and generating a whole load of reports (often as Excel
formatted spreadsheets, thanks to Spreadsheet::WriteExcel), and even updating
the website with information extracted from Sage Line 50.

In the end, I even used a MySQL database on Linux to hold all the product
details, accessed by staff using IE on their Microsoft PCs to a bespoke
application in PHP running on the Linux server which actually wrote details
like the product line description and pirces directly the Sage Line50 files.

I was pretty pleased with the set-up in the end. The rate at which the
delivery driver could go from an order coming in on paper, to raise and print
a delivery note and invoice using Sage running on Microsoft XP, I don't think
could be beaten. Meanwhile, all the work behind the scenes was going on in
Linux, where it was much easier to control.