i'm a real newbie to linux since i'm trying to shift from Win XP SP II to Linux/Ubuntu 8.04LTS. With my Win XP box, I've developed some applics regarding saving, adding and editing and viewing of work-data. Now i'm trying to use my linux/Ubuntu 8.04LTS LiveCD install on my personal home computer and try to use it. With my WinXP, i've used MS Access as back end database and visual basic as front end for my applics. Want to know which to intall and updated with my Ubuntu to accomplish my tasks. Thanks in anticipation.--

Have a look at Wine. It's a program that allows you to run Windows apps under Linux.

It does give fairly good results; not all Windows programs work with it, but it's always worth giving it a try.

The homepage is http://www.winehq.org/ to get more information. Also, the Linux distro you're using should have Wine in their repositories.

This page
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...ication&iId=12
tells me that you may be able to get Access working, but there may be issues with it. As for your own programs, you'll just need to try them out for yourself.

There's a good chance you will be able to get them working. But if you can't, and you need to re-write them, I'd suggest you look up Gambas -- it's a programming language that is supposed to be reasonably similar to VB, so you may be able to port your apps fairly easily.

As the other poster said, you can port VB apps to Gambas without much difficulty. However, if you really want to port them so they can run natively on Linux, you will need to choose another database backend, like postgres or mysql, and of course, you'll need to port the databases that you already have as well.