Hi. I need to use the GraphPad Prism software on Zorin. This is an app to analyze and graph data that is very commonly used in all types of science labs. I use this app at work everyday and need to install it on Zorin, but the software only runs on Windows and MacOS.
On their website, the developers say they literally have no plans to extend the app to Linux, but they quote a customer that explains how they use it through WINE. Since I 1. have no coding experience, 2. am new to Linux, 3. need to use this app (yes, this app specifically, not R or Excel or Python), 4. don't understand WINE or "virtual machines", and especially since they explicitly say that "GraphPad has not tried to use Wine and cannot provide technical support", I need help installing (?) the software and getting it to work properly.
Here is what the website quotes as instructions:
- Create a 64-bit wine prefix (32-bit did not work for me).
export WINEARCH=win64
export WINEPREFIX=~/.prism8
wineboot -i
- Install DLLs and fonts. gdiplus is required to launch the application (it crashes otherwise). msxml6 is required to read and save .pzfx files (because they contain XML headers). .pzf files work just fine without msxml6. Finally, Windows fonts are required to render text in graphs properly. If corefonts doesn't work, try allfonts or copying fonts from a Windows installation. The Arch Linux wiki has a couple of good guides for this.
winetricks gdiplus msxml6 corefonts
- Finally, run the 64-bit msi Prism installer.
wine start ~/Downloads/InstallPrism8-64bit.msi
Obviously, I don't understand any of this, especially because they're talking about Arch Linux. How would this work on Zorin? I do have a dual boot and can perfectly use Windows and run the app, but it makes no sense to me to do that just for 1 type of file I use, since there are multiple other apps I work with which run just fine on Zorin (I am trying to fully transition to Linux, eventually).
On the website, they also mention this:
Prism under Windows under Linux
If you run Windows as a virtual machine (using Vmware software) under Linux, then any Windows software will run under Windows.
What is the difference between WINE and virtual machines? Which one is more appropriate for this type of software? My laptop has 16 GB RAM and the Zorin partition is 250 GB on an SDD (in case that has any relevance).
I have a few deadlines coming up and need to get analyzing some data asap, so hopefully someone can guide me through this lol
Thank you!