>>AV software will not be an economically viable business on the Linux OS, and I think they are beginning to realize it. In five years of using Linux I have never had a successful viri attack on my box. In my mailbox I have had countless WinXX viri trigger harmlessly or fail to trigger at all. It makes doing a post mortum easy and risk free. Under WINE, I once fired the SirCam viri just to see it work. It was easy to follow and the results were easy to reverse. All the changes stood out like a sore thumb, and none could in any way affect the Linux installation. In fact, only those who run their Linux installation as 'root' or have no root password, which are really stupid things to do, will ever be affected by a linux virus, if a serious one ever appears. The worst thing that could happen is the a user's account files are deleted, which would take all of 30 seconds to recreate, and a minute or two to restore other files from backups.
>
>I have one problem about Linux - and that is that I am currently hooked to Visual FoxPro. How do you handle this situation? What language do you currently use? What languages would you recommend, to handle business data?
>
>TIA, Hilmar.

There are several combinations.
1) Oracle + Tora (similar to Toad)+ Browser (Galeon, Mozilla, Konqueror - I like Galeon.)
2) Forte4j + Java + MySQL or PostgreSQL
3) KDevelop + Qt3 + C++ + PostgreSQL
4) Kylix + one of several backends.
5) D3 for Linux, from RainingData (a GUI RAD based on the Pick System. A complete GUI RAD Dev tool + RDBMS.
6) Dozens of other IDE & GUI RADs, like Emacs, CodeWarrior, etc. Lacking a good GUI design tool makes them harder to use and less efficent.
7) Believe it or not, you can use OpenOffice and have a complete GUI RAD dev tool. OO has an internal dBase driver and data source administration. The development screens look a lot like Access. Or, one can easily create an ODBC connection to MySQL (which I did last night) and have a very nicely integrated system, with tables, forms, reports, queries, labels, edit screens, etc... The whole works. Integration into a wp, spreadsheet, presentation manager and graphics system is a bonus, and most could be done without writing a single like of code using StarBasic.

Option 3, my favorite, is entirely LGPL or GPL. KDevelop is equal to or better than most GUI RAD Dev tools, and I prefer it to Kylix. C++ is the most powerful language of all and is OOP. With Qt 3.x, data-aware widgets make form design a snap. PostgreSQL allows the use of C & C++ code in the stored procedures, and as extensions to supplied functions. It is also an OOP database base, allowing inheritance from other tables. It is very Oracle compatible in its SQL syntax and has a nice maintenance app in psql. There is an entire enterprise accounting package, SQL-Ledger, written in Perl for PostgreSQL, and it is GPL, which means the source is included. http://www.sql-ledger.org/

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Financial/Accounting/ (several acct packages)
http://www.fitrix.com/ (non GPL)