Running ZipForm6 On Linux (Fedora 14) Natively

In my earlier post “Running ZipForms On Linux Using WINE,” I described how to get ZipForm6 running under using the Wine libraries. WINE, for those of you who don’t know, is a set of libraries that attempt to duplicate the functionality of the Windows libraries. WINE is not an emulator. In fact Wine stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. Instead, WINE is a set of foreign libraries used to attempt to run programs written for Windows on computer running Linux without use of an emulator (such as VirtualBox OSE) or the need to purchase a Windows license.

In my experience, most programs written for Windows in Java, such as ZipForm6, can be made to run under WINE if one can get the installer to run, which is not always the case. This involves installing the Oracle Java Run-Time Engine (or JRE) for Windows using WINE.

I was satisfied with that state of affairs until this morning when Steven Horton left a comment asking whether, since Java was designed to be “Write Once, Run Anywhere”, shouldn’t there be a way to run java programs directly under a native JRE for Linux? “Yes,” I said to myself, “Yes, there should!”

What I discovered is that getting ZipForm6 to run on a JRE written for Linux was even easier than using WINE! Here’s what you need to do.

First, make sure you have a JRE installed. Fedora uses the OpenJDK JRE which is almost identical to the JRE released by Oracle/Sun except for the widget set which had to be rewritten because of licensing issues. It seems to work fine for ZipForm6. To install the JRE on Fedora, use the following command:

sudo yum -y install java-1.6.0-openjdk

If you have openoffice.org installed, then you already have a JRE installed.

Next, you need to download ZipForm6. I like to use the wget program. These lines create a directory and uses it to download and unpack the installer:

mkdir zipform6
cd zipform6
wget http://dl3.zipform.com/download/zf6standard.exe
unzip zf6standard.exe
unzip InstallerData/Disk1/InstData/Resource1.zip

That’s right. There’s a zip file inside the zip file. Brilliant.

Anyhow, it turns out, of all these thousands of files, we only need three. Well, two. But I like to have the icon available as well. We can put these files anywhere, but the updater program expects them in the home directory, so we’ll just put them there:

mv "C_/InstallAnyhereFiles/JV-DesktopInstallFiles/Scripts/Windows/Build PC_JAR/desktopvw.jar" ~/
mv "C_/InstallAnyhereFiles/JV-DesktopInstallFiles/Scripts/Windows/Build PC_JAR/Updater.jar" ~/
mv C_/InstallAnyhereFiles/JV-DesktopInstallFiles/Icons/zf6.gif ~/

Since the rest of the thousands of files are completely unnecessary so we can get rid of them:

cd
rm -rf zipform6

Then to run ZipForm6, just type:

java -jar ~/desktopvw.jar

Or, if your system doesn’t have the java JRE in your PATH variable, you can run it with:

/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0/jre/bin/java -jar ~/desktopvw.jar

If you are using a 64-bit version of Fedora, use:

/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0.x86_64/jre/bin/java -jar ~/desktopvw.jar

A couple of notes:

• This should work with any Linux distribution with OpenOffice.org (or the new LibreOffice fork) installed.
• You can easily set up an icon using your favorite Desktop Environment.
• Eventually you will need to update the program. When that happens, just click the Update button in the usual way and the program will update. You will get a warning saying, “The last operation could not be completed.” Don’t worry about it. The “operation” is the Updater trying to relaunch ZipForm6 by running zipform6.exe. Just click past it and ignore it. You will have to restart ZipForm6 manually by typing the above command or clicking the icon you set up.
• As far as I can tell, ZipForm6 seems to run just as fast under WINE as it does natively. I was hoping for an improvement because ZipForm6 runs quite slow for me since I am using an old EEE PC 900 Netbook.
• Your data is stored in a directory called ZipForm in your home folder. If you need to copy ZipForm6 to another computer just copy the three files (desktopvw.jar, Upater.jar and zf6.gif) and the ZipForm directory to your home directory on the other machine.

That’s all there is to it. Now get out there and write some contracts!

Java and VirtualBox OSE are registered trademarks of Oracle, Inc. ZipForms is a registered trademark of ZipLogic Inc.