Using MDAC with Wine

October 24, 2008 at 5:13 pm | In Thoughts | 4 Comments
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I’ve written before about my experiences of using the Wine system to run Windows based applications under Ubuntu linux. My job now requires me to use a Windows based application written in Visual Basic to work with data stored in a Microsoft Access database. It seemed silly to boot up my Windows workstation solely for the purposes of using this application. So I set myself the task of exploring to see if it would be possible.

The only major roadblock was that when the application started in the console I would see errors like this:

err:ole:CoGetClassObject class {f9043c85-f6f2-101a-a3c9-08002b2f49fb} not registered
…
err:ole:CoGetClassObject class {00000100-0000-0010-8000-00aa006d2ea4} not registered

I figured this couldn’t be good and my suspicions were confirmed when the application complained about not being able to access the database. To solve the issue I undertook the following steps:

  1. Used the winetricks script to download and install the MDAC 2.8 package
  2. Registered the dao360.dll file that was distributed with the application using this command
    wine regsvr32 dao360.dll

Once I did this the application started, could access the data, and worked flawlessly. Yet again I find myself indebted to those who work so hard on open source projects such as Wine and Linux in general.

4 Comments

  1. Glad it worked for you.

    Just curious: would an earlier MDAC work for you?
    i.e. would mdac25 or mdac27 work as well for your app?

    Comment by Dan Kegel — October 24, 2008 #

  2. @Dan,

    That’s an interesting question. It is likely that the app will run with an earlier version of MDAC. The app it self isn’t doing anything revolutionary. I just chose the 2.8 version because it was the latest version.

    As it stands it’s working no so I’m loath to experiment any more.

    Comment by techxplorer — October 25, 2008 #

  3. Hmm, looks like dao360.dll comes with jet40, not mdac28.
    Did you also have to install jet40 to run your app?

    Comment by Dan Kegel — November 28, 2008 #

  4. @Dan,

    No, the dao360.dll file came with the app and was in the root installation directory of the app.

    Comment by techxplorer — November 30, 2008 #


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