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Installation on Linux (using Wine)

Previous section: Installation by using a Microsoft installer file (.msi) on Windows 7, 8.1 and 10

This topic contains the following sections:

Installation on Linux is described by the example of installing Altaxo on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Altaxo requires the full .Net framework, including Gui components such as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was developed for the Windows operating system. This means that Altaxo can not run natively on Linux, but requires the installation of Wine, a compatibility layer that allows computer programs developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. When writing this installation tutorial, the version 4.6.x.x of Altaxo was used, requiring the .NET framework 4.6 at this time.

The main tasks that are needed for installation are:

  • install Wine and the .Net framework 4.8

  • Copy-and-Paste installation of Altaxo

Installation of Wine on Ubuntu

A manual for installing Wine on Ubuntu can be found here. Please look at this source for fresh information about the installation process. At the time of writing, it was not necessary to follow the steps described there. Instead, Wine could be installed on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS using the following steps:

Install wine-development (wine-stable did not work with Altaxo):

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sudo apt-get install wine-development

Furthermore, you will need cabextract to extract the .cab files of the .Net framework:

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sudo apt-get install cabextract

Now (important!) open a fresh terminal window (which was not used before with sudo), and use:

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rm -fr ~/.wine
export WINEARCH=win32  
export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine"  
winecfg

The last command takes a bit and finally opens a configuration dialog window. Make sure that for 'Windows Version:' Windows 7 is chosen, and close the dialog with OK.

Now download winetricks, and use it to install the Windows fonts, the Gdi+ subsystem, and the .Net framework 4.8:

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mkdir Winetricks
cd Winetricks
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
chmod +x winetricks
bash winetricks -q corefonts gdiplus dotnet48

This again will take a bit, and a lot of error messages will appear, which can be ignored.

Copy-and-Paste installation of Altaxo

Finally or in the meantime, download AltaxoBinaries-x.x.xxxx.x.zip from here (unstable) or here (stable), unzip the content of the file in a newly created folder Altaxo in your home directory.

Then open a terminal (make sure that the installation of .Net framework is finished), go to the bin subfolder of Altaxo, and start Altaxo with wine:

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cd Altaxo/bin
wine AltaxoStartup.exe

The Gui looks a little bit outdated on Linux, but at least it works:

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Next section: User interface