Running Folio Views under Wine

[Dan McGarry]

Philip Goodfellow wrote:
> Has anyone here had experience of running the Windows program Folio 
> Views under wine on Edubuntu 6.06?

I used a lot of Folio (later NextPage, now Fast Folio) products in a
past life, including Views and siteDirector, but never tried running
them under Wine. That's mostly because wine wasn't really viable at that
time. IIRC, Views 4.2 was released in 1998 or 1999.

Even running under Windows, we had significant problems using the Folio
4.x software (its 3.x line was brilliant). APIs did not work as
advertised, and we had significant problems getting it running in
anything other than vanilla Windows systems. I suspect that:

a) This is very old software, possibly relying on obsoleted
functionality; and/or

b) It's just flaky as all get-out because the front-end devs did some
very quick and dirty hacks trying to get it out the door.

You have a couple of options for a work-around:

1) Get yourself a copy of Folio/NextPage siteDirector[*], and make the
infobase available via a web server independant of your Edubuntu setup
(perhaps in a vm if you don't have the hardware available);

[*] From the NextPage website:

"Folio or NXT support?

"We sold the NXT, LivePublish and Folio product lines to Fast Search and
Transfer. If you have any support questions about those product please
contact them from www.fastsearch.com."

See also:

http://www.fastsearch.com/l3a.aspx?m=497

2) Export the content to a different format (e.g. html) and make it
available that way. The infobase raw format is all markup, so exporting
to HTML is a fairly straightforward (if not trivial) operation.

> The apps db at winehq suggests that Folio Views should work without 
> problem (although this refers to version Folio version 4.3 and Ubuntu 
> Breezy: http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=3919)

4.2 was the second of a few bug-fix releases. On my recommendation, we
moved our company's base products from Folio/NextPage to FOSS right
after 4.3 (and a lot of customer complaints).

Sorry that I can't offer better feedback than that. I guess it's clear
that my experience with Folio in an online environment was, well, a
little bitter. 8^/

-- 
Dan McGarry	it.psl at fsp.org.vu

IT Consultant
Community Communications Project