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Minty N3fjp

N3FJP on Linux Mint #

Here’s a brief tutorial to accompany a screencast I made demonstrating how to install the N3FJP ARRL Field Day Log software on Linux Mint. These instructions should also work on other linux variants as well, and possible Mac OS though I haven’t verified that.

Pre-requisites #

  • Linux Mint 22.1
  • x86 processor

Steps #

I tried to figure out a way to do this without having to use the terminal, but this is the closest I got. If you don’t specify anything and launch winetricks from the GUI, winecfg will create a default wineprefix that has a 64 bit architecture. In order for this to work, we need a wineprefix with 32 bit architecture. You can use winetricks to create an alternate wineprefix and do all of these steps in there, but if the default prefix is 64 bit, winetricks will also think this prefix is 64 bit, which is a bug in winetricks. To avoid all of that hassle, use the command above.

If you already have a 64 bit default wineprefix, you remove it with winetricks annihilate. BEWARE This will delete any apps you have already installed in Wine

  1. Open a terminal and launch winetricks with the following command
WINEARCH=win32 winetricks

  1. (Optional) Select “Enable silent install”

    • This is optional, but recommended unless you enjoy clicking through dialog boxes

  2. Select the default wineprefix

  3. Install a Windows DLL or component

  4. Select the dotnet48 and jet40 packages and click OK

  5. Wait (This can take several minutes)

  6. When the Winetricks dialog pops back up, select “Run an arbitrary executable” and click OK

  7. Choose the FIELDDAY.exe installer

  8. Follow the prompts in the installer

  9. Done!

For the more visual learners, here is a link to the Youtube video

Postscript #

While these instructions were tested on an x86 system, it should be possible to do the same thing on an ARM system such as a raspberry pi. Setting that up is out of scope for this article, but I don’t think it’s impossible. KM4ACK’s excellent 73Linux does this for installing VARA on a Raspberry PI. I’m certain that a similar setup could work to bring N3FJP’s suite of software to the Raspberry PI as well. But that is left as an exercise for the reader