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FoxPro 2.0 (SCO) Running Under Linux: Try Flagship?

From Joseph Gazarik on Mon, 11 Oct 1999

Dear James,

Hello, my name is Joe Gazarik. I am a software support specialist

with Signal Software in Pittsburgh, PA. Signal produces accounting software for the automotive aftermarket. Our current product, TireWorks Gold is FoxPro 2.6 based running on SCO. I have been commissioned to get that FoxPro 2.6 SCO program working in Linux. I would appreciate any and all help that you could lend me. Do you have any suggestions in getting FoxPro 2.6 runtime for SCO Unix running on Linux? Thanks in advance for your assitance!

Best Regards, Joe Gazarik

Well, I don't know of a Linux port of FoxPro. It seems unlikely that we'd see one any time soon since Fox software was aquired by Microsoft.

In general you can run SCO compatible software under Linux by using the iBCS libraries. For that I'd run Caldera's OpenLinux since they provide a kernel with iBCS patches already applied.

For FoxPro specifically you might find that they rely on some of SCO's proprietary libraries. You'd have to copy those unto your Linux system from your SCO system --- and you'd have to watch the licensing issues that relate to that. Obviously that might cause some serious problems for your software distribution plans.

You could port your software to Flagship (http://www.wgs.com/fsad.html). That is a package from WorkGroup Solutions which provides a set of programming tools for compiling dBase code (with Fox, Clipper and other xBase extensions).

You can then create and distribute standalone native applications using your existing xBase sources. The resulting programs are royalty free and should run on Linux systems without any need for iBCS or any proprietary libraries.

As a commercial software developer this sounds like it would be your best bet.

In addition it looks like Flagship offers modules to support connections to SQL backend databases. This could be useful if you develope client/server versions of your package in the future.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 48 December 1999

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