Running ECCO Pro in Linux

I have been using ECCO Pro for the past 22 years. I am "Windows literate," but I don't consider myself to be an ECCO power-user. After all this time, there are still things about ECCO that I don't know. In the past, I was able to synchronize it with a Handspring pocket computer. That's history.

I was a member of a free software community, and  tried easily over 100 Windows and MS DOS applications. I have also worked in software development. With this behind me, I still think that ECCO is unusually-well-crafted software. I have been keeping on old Dell desktop running Windows XP mainly so that I could continue to use ECCO.

My database has hardly ever crashed, and it's not been too difficult to fix things when they've gone wrong. The program itself has degraded a bit, however. As you know, it's now 2019 and our software is pretty long in the tooth. Like so many of us, I have been deliberating long and hard about how to move forward.

Having developed an ever-growing distaste for the antics of strong, arrogant corporations, I want Microsoft out of my life (and I have no love for Apple either). I have been exploring different versions of Linux for the last four years, and recently decided to throw in my lot with a distribution called "Mint," running a Windows-emulation environment named "Wine" with the goal of continuing my life with ECCO.

With the help of an experienced Unix junkie, I've been running the Fedora version of Linux for over a year before installing Mint on this old Dell laptop. Fedora has been my daily driver. But I'm drawn to Mint because it has a large installed base. I also find it be more user-friendly than Fedora (Fedora is a good OS).

Right now, to my amazement, ECCO is running rather nicely on this Linux machine. I was even able to just zip the old data file onto this box. I can even cut-and-paste between the systems! Installing Wine was very difficult, requiring many false starts: I don't find Wine user-friendly: there are installation routines for it out there on the Web that simply don't work.

There are still two issues, one minor and another that's gnawing at me. The minor one is that ECCO's help system, which is Windows-dependent, is inoperative. Since ECCO's help system is simply its user manual, and I printed the entire manual many years ago, this isn't important. Printing, however, is still a question will I be able to get this feature to work? Fortunately, Hewlett-Packard offers an excellent driver, seeming to handle every printer they have ever made. I have not attempted printing yet from my ECCO-Wine-Mint system. Even under Windows, I experienced ECCO's printing to be quite an intricate slog, and right now, although it is engaging the HP driver, the routine loops almost uncontrollably.

Of course, I'd prefer to be using a Linux-native ECCO work-alike, but I have not found that. Second choice would be a combination of Linux programs that do a good job of emulating ECCO's functions. For outlining, there is a friendly application named CherryTree (there's a Windows version of it too). Still, there's the issue of data migration between the programs.

That's where I am now.