Ellen White 2008 CD-ROM on Linux

Posted on December 10, 2010

Credit largely goes to Michael Prewitt and Dr. Phil Mills for their work on this. Most of the information was derived from the comments area of this blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20110206051046/http://michaelprewitt.com/2009/05/egw-cd-rom-via-darwine-on-os-x-%E2%80%94-its-fast-1177/?replytocom=1005 I wanted to be able to make it more accessible and just delineate the steps in a simple fashion.

  1. Once you have the CD install it on Windows.

  2. You will then need to open the program regedit. You can do this from Run in your start menu. We will need to export registries from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT for *, HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software for EGWResearch2008, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software for EGWResearch2008, and last from HKEY_USERS in one of the folders that contains Software and then EGWResearch2008. I would specify more on the last one except it varies. (Over the years of installing this way, the registries may not be absolutely critical to running the application. Moses Privett has done it without them by running the Autoreg.exe in the Folio folder before running Views.exe. I haven’t tested it extensively, but if you don’t have access to a Windows installation it’s worth a try. Otherwise you can email me and I have all the needed registry entries in a tarball.)

  3. At this point you will want to consider how you will get these files (the installation of Folio views and the registries) on your Linux partition. I simply rebooted and mounted my NTFS partition containing Vista. Depending on if you have a virtual machine or dual boot will dictate what comes next.

  4. Install wine if you haven’t already. Fedora users at the root prompt type in yum install wine, Debian or Ubuntu users will type in apt-get install wine (might be wrong I don’t use either; use synaptic if I’m wrong). Make sure it is running and configured.

  5. Copy the Estate folder into where your drive C is mapped on wine. The default for Fedora is /home/youraccount/.wine/drive_c and should be the same on all distros, but don’t take my word for it.

  6. You need to install the Visual C++ library packages next. What you need are 2003, 2005, and maybe 2008. You can get these through a shell script called winetricks that you can find here: http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks Otherwise you can manually download the files from Microsoft’s site and install them yourself. I had to do that since winetricks is having issues with 64 bit Linux.

  7. Next step import the registries you just exported.

  8. Test to see if it is working by going in the terminal to /home/youraccount/.wine/drive_c/Estate/Research 2008/Folio and type in ./Views.exe It will launch and not give you the menu but the option to open an infobase. egw-comp is all of her books and writings, egw-scrip is Scripture references, egw-index is the index, apl-wap is words of the Adventist pioneers, apl-hist is historical works, and that should be enough to get you started. If it all works we made progress.

  9. I doubt you want to open this in the command line every time you go to use it. If you use Gnome, open up the menu editor which is alacarte if it is installed. Add the shortcut to whichever category you want it in. You will want to make a new item and for the command this is what I typed in “wine C:\Estate\Research 2008\Folio\Views.exe” (“wine /home/youraccount/.wine/drive_c/Estate/Research 2008/Folio/Views.exe” also works and probably more reliably) I haven’t made an icon that works with Gnome yet. If you make a suitable one feel free to send it to me and I will edit this post and include it.

(Update March 27, 2013: Moses Privett shared with me this logo which I believe is done by Michael Prewitt)

You can right click on it here and save it.

Now you should be able to use the Ellen White CD-ROM on Linux or any Unix.