How to make Banklink run under Ubuntu Linux

I’ve been a fan of FOSS/Open Source software for quite a few years now. One of the results of this is that I now use Ubuntu Linux as my main PC at the office, and also on my Asus EeePC when I’m travelling. It works great, and I love it.

Of course, in business, there are always specialist applications that are required to operate. Because a bunch of these applications are Windows-only, a long time ago I decided to buy Codeweavers’ Crossover Office Professional.

Banklink, a very handy accounting tool for business

It’s great, especially the version I’m using on at the time of writing (version 10.0).

To run our business, I need to be able to run BankLink Books, and also Ace Payroll, under Ubuntu Linux 10.10. Running applications under an emulated Windows environment will never be perfect, and sometimes there are hiccups. This is the story of addressing one of these hiccups.

To start, I’ll mention that Ace Payroll, at least version 3.37c, works perfectly under Ubuntu 10.10 and Crossover Office version 10. Perfectly; I haven’t had any problems with it at all.

However, BankLink Books 2010 (version 5.19) had a strange glitch in it. Typically, when you open an application, it notifies the window manager that it’s loaded. This is what makes the application accessible via the status bar and also by switching applications via Alt-Tab. However it seems BankLink under Crossover Office doesn’t correctly notify the window manager that it’s available. That means that it’s not visible on the system tray, and if I minimise it – it completely disappears and I can’t get it back!

Today, I tackled this issue, with the help of a kind person going under the moniker of “AbsoluteMonkey” at the unofficial IRC support channel (#codeweaver on FreeNode, port 6667). There were a certain few diagnostic questions that we went through, but which meant nothing to me. Therefore I’m going to exclude them from this blog because I can’t add anything intelligent to them. However I’ve saved them, and they’re available on request. Basic upshot: we ran xwininfo, and then xwininfo -wm. Things were also slightly more complicated for me, because I partially botched my installation of Crossover Office. I don’t have the Configure button in my menu, so I had to go hunting for it.

I found the configuration tool under ~/home/eric/.cxoffice/desktopdata/cxoffice-0/cxmenu/xdg-applications/CrossOver. It was called Manage Bottles. It linked to a much more realistic place: sh -c ‘”/home/eric/cxoffice/bin/cxsetup”‘. Upon loading the Bottle Manager, I selected the appropriate bottle (Banklink was installed under a Windows XP bottle entitled “Other Application”), clicked Control Panel, and ran the Wine Configuration tool:

Once inside the Configuration tool, I simply navigated to the “Graphics” configuration section, and clicked the “Emulate a virtual desktop” option. I also changed the desktop size from the default 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768:

Configuring the graphics in wine

Voila! Banklink can now be minimised and maximised, and even alt-tabbed to! I hope this post can help someone else. Please leave a comment if you find it useful!