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Post by Admin on Aug 6, 2016 15:35:24 GMT
This message is intended to start a new "thread".
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Post by Vaughan on Aug 21, 2016 13:41:30 GMT
This message is intended to start a new "thread". I used MPRO for years on my old Windows PC. Now I mainly use a MacBook Pro which has Windows 7 installed. I also have an old PC with Linux. I've tried, unsuccessfully, to install MPRO on the latter but to no avail. Any suggestions would be very welcome --- by the way, I'm a driver rather then a mechanic as far as computers are concerned! |
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Post by Roy Sibbett on Sept 7, 2016 19:46:26 GMT
This message is intended to start a new "thread". I registered a week or so ago but I have not heard anything back yet so I can't login. If the Admin sees this please can you get my registration completed. Also there doesn't seem to be much activity yet. I am having problems with Vdos and could urgently use some advice. Roy |
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Post by Peter G Shaw on Sept 7, 2016 20:16:24 GMT
Vaughan,
I run Mpro on Linux quite successfully. I think the easiest way would be if you looked back at the earlier forum, messages 26, 46 & 47. Otherwise it's a heck of a lot to repeat here.
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Post by Peter Daniel on Sept 17, 2016 15:32:10 GMT
I have tried the vDos on Win 7 & 10. In both cases it solved the problem of window size, and even allowed limited printing to Epson printer visa USB, but alas, CTRL/I didn't work anymore. A work around allows me to enter new records, but print formats remain a problem. Try vDos on your Win7 machine, and let us (there's three of us now) know how you got on.
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Post by Roy Sibbett on Feb 17, 2017 17:57:32 GMT
Hi Peter - I haven't logged on recently as there is no activity so didn't see your post. I solved the "Control I" problem and various corruptions that occured in my data files by emailing the creator of vDos, Jos Schaars, and he knew the probem was related to the current version of vDos 2016.06.01 and suggested that I, on payment of a small 5 Euro donation, use a link he would send me to enable the download of the previous vDos version 2015.11.01 and once I downloaded that all my problems went away. MPRO runs fine under the earlier version of vDos and Control I and all other functions work as normal (including the plus key on the numeric keypad). I suggest you try that approach and you should be ok. Best wishes, Roy. p.s. I wonder why no one is using this forum as the previous one seemed popular with diehard fans at least, seems a pity. I never heard back from the administrator about confirming my membership of the forum!
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Post by Roy Sibbett on Feb 17, 2017 18:06:43 GMT
Just in case you need it, although you can get it on the vDos website: Jos Schaars email address is jos@vdos.info
Roy
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Post by Peter G. Shaw on Feb 17, 2017 20:10:10 GMT
Hello Roy,
Like you, I also wonder about the paucity of communications on this board. One thought maybe the difficulty of actually getting here: it took some experimenting on my part, and just for the record, this is how I do it:
I access freeforums.net, then under forums directory I do a search for Masterfile. That finds the forum, and then I click on the icon to get to the actual forum.
Of course, it maybe that a lot of people have simply abandoned Mpro, after all, it is now almost antique. Then of course there all the problems with Windows, or rather Microsoft, removing access to DOS based programs. I actually use dosemu via Linux Mint v.13, and even here there is a problem in that whilst the existing works well, Mint v.13 becomes unsupported in April. Now if I move up to v 17, I already know that dosemu loses the "#" facility, unless I copy the appropriate files from v.13 into v.17. I haven't tried v.18, but don't expect it to be any different.
Still, at my time of life, I'll probably get it working as I really can't be bothered faffing around learning a new database program and converting my 200K plus records.
Regards,
Peter G. Shaw
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Post by Roy Sibbett on Feb 22, 2017 1:02:03 GMT
Hi Peter
Thanks for the prompt reply. I have no experience of Linux. I downloaded it once out of interest but soon abandoned it through lack of time and enthusiasm. I do hope you will get it running in the new version. I relied on old xp machines to run Mpro and used it heavily in my work up to my retirement last year. They still use it and have been hoping that we could convert it to Windows 7 etc. Vdos seems to be the answer for us anyway. I wonder what happened to the regular users of the old quick topic forum. Maybe we are all getting old. What do you use Mpro for, if I may be so bold. You mentioned 200k records. Mine is used to compensate for the shortfalls in our commercial software system and utilises extracted data to present reports and maintain historical records. Very flexible and nothing else seems to come close. Did you know John Campbell, I always wondered what happened to him. I was in contact with Ian Simpson, an Mpro stalwart but he didn't seem to know. Hope to hear from you in due course.
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Post by Peter G. Shaw on Feb 24, 2017 21:53:07 GMT
Hello Roy,
Linux:
I converted to Linux Mint when Microsoft stopped supporting XP because I wasn't prepared to get rid of fully working equipment and change software just to augment Microsoft's bottom line. I think I've proved the point by now in that I'm using what is by today's standards obsolescent equipment and software 3 years after the end of XP. In fact I have two laptops, main & backup, which are as near as I can get them identical, actually the older, less capable one is my main machine and required an additional 500Mb RAM to get it to 2Gb to match the other, so I did spend some money, but not because of Microsoft, if that makes sense.
The actual change was quite easy because I was already using Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office Writer & Libre Office Calc so all I needed to do was download the Linux versions, do a bit of data copying & Robert was my Uncle. The other programs were somewhat more difficult in that initially I had to use Wine, an early version thereof, which did cause me a few problems, however, later versions made life a lot easier and now I will be on version 2 and running a 32bit CAD program reasonably satisfactorily. Another program has been, slowly, replaced by a Linux equivalent to such an extent that when I complete my upgrade to Mint v.18.1, I will forgo that old program. That left a tax program, replaced by the free HMRC equivalent, just as easy to use, and £25 cheaper! And then there's Mpro.
Initially I used a virtual machine, Oracle Virtual Box, to run Windows XP, which in turn allowed the use of Mpro. The only problem there was that scrolling was very iffy, in fact almost unusable. Then I discovered DOSemu, which with a bit of help from someone on another forum I managed to get working more or less satisfactory. Searching can be bit slow, but in reality, searching 200K+ records in about 10 secs is ok, not the fastest, but manageable. The downside is that DOSemu is I think, abandonware, so no support. In Mint v.13, it's ok, but in both v17.2 and 18.1, it does not recognise the "#" key. I did find that by transferring certain files from v.13 to 17.2 I could get it to work. I've tried it on v18.1, but with limited success, and so far I'm not sure why. But, I've got a couple of months yet before v.13 becomes unsupported. Mint v. 18.1 is long term support (LTS) to 2021, by which time, if I'm still here, I'll be heading far too fast towards 80.
Usage of Mpro:
Purely for home use. A file of most expenditure going back over 25 years (I used MFPC before Mpro) together with records taken from old bankbooks going back to 1961. It's now showing its worth as I can use it both to determine when we bought something, and hence its age, and when we went somewhere (since '93 only). An admirable substitute for the memory box which at times seems overloaded with unnecessary junk!
Other files, much less used but in order of importance, engineering (as a very basic Model Engineer it saves me having to root through 25 years worth of magazines), house contents (needs updating), listings of CD's (very little use), following a car break-in and loss of a cheque book & card, a listing of when cheques were taken into use (one wonders how the thieves got away with it because the signature on the cheques was nothing like the signature on the card). And that's about it.
John Campbell:
Had dealings with him twice. Once rather embarrassingly - a command wouldn't work because I spelt it incorrectly, secondly, when I discovered an oddity in one of the service files which he confirmed. Other than that, nothing.
It says something for the program that it just works, and works, and works, ..... and I cannot see any reason why I should stop using it. Ok, printing is a problem, but then I don't print, or rather I haven't printed anything since I printed out the OLM quite a few years ago.
Regards,
Peter
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Post by Peter G. Shaw on Feb 25, 2017 16:52:22 GMT
I've cracked (I think & hope) the problem with the lack of # on later Mint program versions. It seems as if for some reason, DOSemu now defaults to possibly the US keyboard. Not too sure of that, but what I did was to change a couple of files in Linux and it now works. For information and future reference, here's the info:
In root mode, navigate to, and open /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf.
Now look for this entry under Keyboard Related Settings: # $_layout = "auto". Change auto to "load uk" and delete the # symbol.
Now look for this entry (near the bottom of the file) under X Window Settings, or similar: # $_X_keycode = (off). Change (off) to (on) and delete the "#" symbol.
This will restore "#" operation to Mpro. Note that it's not a Mpro problem, more a DOSemu problem. Further information will be found by going to the DOSemu website and navigating to the Readme section dealing with DOSemu v.1.4. (Not the earlier versions.) Sections 2.1.6 & 2.1.7 of the Readme apply.
That leaves one problem, which may not be a problem! Under Mint v.13, the font is reasonably fine, but I have found it difficult to read. This could of course be due to my eyesight deteriorating. Under Mint v.17 & 18, the font is a lot heavier and therefore maybe easier to read. Time will tell.
Regards,
Peter G. Shaw
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Post by Roy Sibbett on Feb 25, 2017 20:44:27 GMT
Hi Peter
Thanks for the info. I use MPRO, and MFPC before it, as you do/did, for personal banking etc, but as I worked for an engineering company with financial software lacking in much capability I extracted data from it and set up an all singing all dancing MPRO system of financial reporting covering sales, purchases, debtors, creditors,stock, wages etc etc and it is still used some 20 years later on XP pc's. My pending retirement sent me on a quest for a replacement and finding nothing comparable I was dispairing when I came upon the quicktopic MPRO forum. Robert Carn, Ben Stern and Andrew Donaldson and others were busy posting in 2016 and were of great help and support to me as they suggested vDos. I had tried dosBox to no avail but vDos seemed more promising. Since that time I made great strides and now have a workable replacement for XP running on Windows 7 & 10. I also had a membership system for a local Family History Society developed and needed to move it to Windows 10 as as well. It is now running well.
Vdos 2016 worked ok but Control I didn't function and other limitations were present as well as well as occasional file corruptions rendering the file unusable. I contacte Jos Schaars and he suggested reverting to the older 2015 version which solved all the limitations. However once in a while I still hit file corruptions, which until recently were unfathomable. When they occured I had to revert to a backup file.
Recently I twigged on to a cause. I was trying to search and then export by DPL and unknown to me the corruption occured and it was only a week later it surfaced. I investigated and found that a format in MPRO had been corrupted by being written over by something and many spurious characters had appeared causing a format file program error. Once this happened the search library was inaccessable and the file could not be used. This is was had been happening on Vdos 2016 previously. However this time I was able to figure out what had happened. The process causing the error was a Search followed by a file program to export. I suspected the file program but it was actuallty the search that had caused it.
I am still investigating but the suspicion is that the offending line on the search was "ifdup 6 then sel" Repeating this search on a test file seems to cause the corruption on demand. I wonder if you do anything similar on linux and if the duplicate index ifdup command works for you.
I am jealous of your capablility with linux. I had a bit of a whirl at it some years ago and downloaded suze linux but retired defeated after a short period of confusion. Now retired I may have another go. Why did you choose Mint out of interest.
I wonder why Robert Carn etc are absent after setting up this new forum. It would be nice to get it up and running again. When I was involved last year I was approaching retirement and a house move and I had not got time to persue my MPRO interests as I would have liked. It is nice to have someone to correspond with about MPRO. Thank you for your correspondance so far.
Kind regards
Roy
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Post by Peter G. Shaw on Feb 26, 2017 21:21:51 GMT
I haven't done anything particularly complex. My needs are quite basic - usually copy an existing entry, eg Sainsburys, & modify it with new data. Searching is along the lines of "find all entries for whatever", then select the one I'm interested in. Occasionally new entries using Cntrl I. I have done some BASIC programming in the past so know I can do it, but I haven't yet had a specific problem that required it, and frankly, I can't see me ever having to do so. Not now at any rate.
I produced one relative database - for CD's. It worked, so fair enough. And really, that's it for Masterfile. Probably not economically justified but too late now.
Linux.
Looking back I first came across Linux some 25 or so years ago, although I didn't know it, and didn't take it up. What happened was that I got a catalogue of software, Atlantic Coast it may have been, and there towards the back was Red Hat Software - all 25 floppies of it! The Microsoft offering I was using at the time was satisfactory, it may actually have been DOS 3.30, but I was still learning. Still am for that matter!
Later I did hear about this new operating system, and started looking into it, Mandrake as it was, something else, Red Hat, and Suse 9.1. In fact I found Suse 9.1 with the KDE2 desktop very palatable, easy to use, and set up as I wanted it. I even bought two books specifically on Suse 9, and a third general book on Linux, but mainly Suse. However, as before, the Microsoft offering was satisfactory, one of 95OSR2, 98SE or Win2000, so although I dual booted with Suse, I didn't pursue it and eventually removed it.
But then when XP lost it's support, and after the experience I'd had with Win2000 going out of support, plus I already knew that some of my equipment would no longer work properly, and I'd had major problems with networking at my daughter's (Vista, Win7, XP) I thought enough's enough, bye bye Microsoft.
Initially I tried Suse. By now it was on 11.3 or maybe 12.1 along with the KDE4 desktop. Now I have been chewed up by the Linux fanboys over this, but I don't care. As far as I am concerned, KDE4 was a classic example of a programmer saying "Look how clever I am" with no thought for users with next no experience. Whoever thought up this crazy idea of an "almond" in one corner of a screen where it looks for all the world like a screen aberration really needs to taken down a peg or two. Regardless of that, even knowing about the "almond" I was unable to set it up for easy use. I should point out that I don't want fancy wallpaper, I don't want coloured background, I do want clear icons that stand out, I do want either white text on black background or black text of white background. The computer is a tool, not a toy. So that was the end of Suse.
I tried Ubuntu. To be fair, I may not have persevered with it long enough, but the huge icons was a complete turn off, as was the peculiar coloured background. The final straw was when it caused my test machine to crash and I lost everything.
Then I tried Linux Mint with the Mate desktop. Why Mate? Well the only User Guide I could find was for v.13 and it recommended Mate. But I was immediately pleased with the look of it. I liked the Main Menu, similar to that on XP. And I did like the panel at the bottom, again similar to XP. You'll notice that there are things about Windows which I think are quite useful - I'm not an out and out Microsoft hater saying that Windows and Linux shall never meet. So slowly, over a period of a few months I gradually converted my two machines to Mint v.13, by dual-booting to start with, and then once Mint was running satisfactorily, using Mint with XP in reserve, and then finally removing XP.
Another reason for using Mint was of its updating policy which I believe Ubuntu also follows. (Mint is actually based on Ubuntu.) Certain versions are made LTS, ie Long Term Support for 4 years. In between versions were 6 months only. But, they have changed this last 12 months! V.13 was LTS to 04/17, hence my upgrading. V.14 - 16 were 6 months. V.17, 17.1 & 17.2 are LTS to 04/19. V.18 & 18.1 are LTS to 04/21. Which means that upgrading still has to be done, but it's not like Windows - it can be done when I want to do it, at my speed, in my time etc. Note the control I have over doing it. There are still inbetween updates to do, but again, it's at my pleasure. And, something I hadn't noticed until it was pointed out to me, updates are always done in background which means that the computer is never offline.
All in all, I'm very pleased with Mint.
Peter G. Shaw
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Post by Roy Sibbett on Mar 9, 2017 10:47:37 GMT
Thanks for you recent post. The history of your experience with linux was interesting. I may have a go at Mint at some point. I have registered twice now on this forum and both times I got an email back saying that my ProBoard account is pending approval and they would send me a confirmation email when it was approved but nothing so far. Probably not a lot of point persueing it since we seem to be the only users and all the original quicktopic users have disappesred. Did you try and register out of interest, although I note you are still a guest, as I am?
Roy
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Post by Peter G. Shaw on Mar 9, 2017 11:16:23 GMT
I have a vague recollection I may have tried to register, but like you, nothing seemed to happen. Anyway, it works like this as a guest so why bother?'
By the way, I said I had 200K records. I was wrong by a factor of 10 - it's actually 25K+, but even so, for home use, it's still a fair chunk and I wouldn't want to have to type that lot into another database. Mind you, I'd have to learn how to use it first, and then probably learn how to copy the data across. No, I don't think so, Mpro works just fine.
Back onto Mint. I'm now completely up and running on three machines (main, backup & experimental/mess up/mess around with/whatever I want to do with it because it was my daughter's cast off! When all said and done, it's had two new screens and currently has the wrong (American) keyboard fitted, all due to the cackhandedness of her boys!) Anyway I'm on Mint 18.1. I think it's slightly slower than Mint 13, but not sufficient to be a problem. I'm also using Wine 2.2 - by accident since I messed up trying to download Wine 2.0, the stable version. Mine turns out to be part of the development cycle. But, nevermind, it works! I'm now usingvia Wine, a Win32bit CAD program, DesignCad 3D Max v.17.2, albeit with a few very minor oddities so I'm well pleased with it. As I said Mpro is fine now that I've done the # mod (see above) and the over strong font is ok as well so yeah, it's all hunky dory. I've also got full networking set up between the three machines such that I can copy/send files from any one machine to any other machine, in any combination. Which means that in 4 years time, if I'm still here (because I'll be a damn sight nearer 80 than 70 then), I'll have forgotten what I did to get everything up and running!
Regards,
Peter G. Shaw
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