Install Cogin QueueExplorer on Arch Linux

readme.md

Install Install Cogin QueueExplorer on Arch Linux

The guide on Cogin's website for installing on "Linux" actually means installing on a Debian-based system. This guide Arch-ifies the process. This could be made into an AUR package, but I don't have the knowledge or time to maintain such a package, so here's the (hopefully) not outdated way of installing it.

1. Install the pre-requisite software.

sudo pacman -S wine cabextract

2. Create a WINE prefix

The Wine prefix is the "Windows" filesystem under which QueueExplorer will be installed. Set this according to where you would like your application to live.

First, set some variables. I've commented the meaning of each of them so you should get a picture of why we're doing this.

# The WINE prefix location. This is what the official installer script sets it to, but you can place it anywhere you like on your system
export WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wineCogin"

# The architecture under which to run QueueExplorer. According to Cogin, this works best on Win32 due to the underlying .NET framework. Who am I to argue? ;)
export WINEARCH=win32

# No idea what this does, but the official install script does this, best not mess with it.
export WINEDEBUG=-all

# Cogin's words: "Skip installing MONO, since we'll install full .NET Framework later"
export WINEDLLOVERRIDES="mscoree="

Then start wine and create the prefix.

# Start wine, it reads some of the environment variables we set earlier
wine wineboot

# Go to the path you set for the wine-prefix
cd $WINEPREFIX

# Get the latest winetricks script. I guess you could also use the Arch package, but this sticks to the official script's way of handling it
wget -O winetricks https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks

# Make it executable
chmod +x ./winetricks

Install .NET framework and fonts using the winetricks script. These are dependencies of QueueExplorer and need to be installed in order for the program to run at all.

# Install .NET Framework 4.6.2 -- This will take a while!
./winetricks -q dotnet462

# Install Tahoma font -- this won't take a while!
./winetricks -q tahoma

3. Install QueueExplorer in the WINE prefix

Finally, we can ACTUALLY INSTALL the software itself and are done with the yakshaving. Depending on your license, you might not want the latest version, so make sure to set it in the variables we define here. Otherwise, just keep it empty to get the latest version:

# Set the Cogin QueueExplorer version to install.
# Set it to an empty string if you just want the latest version regardless.
QUEUE_EXPLORER_VERSION=5.0.37

# Download the installer executable
wget -O "QueueExplorer${QUEUE_EXPLORER_VERSION}.exe" "https://www.cogin.com/download/mq/download.php?file=QueueExplorer${QUEUE_EXPLORER_VERSION}.exe"

# Run the installer
wine ./QueueExplorer${QUEUE_EXPLORER_VERSION}.exe

Then run through the normal installation process as if you were installing it on a Windows system.

Hello!

Do you success on getting topics and queues working?
I have followed the instruction for arch linux and i try to use it..but it get stuck in this loading and then error like the screenshot
do you have ideas? i really want this to work in linux

@andresparrab That particular error I haven't experienced. Looking at that particular exception, it seems like a connection issue rather than anything else. I would check if you have some type of networking infrastructure in Azure that prevents you from accessing it directly.

I do have a lot of issues with QueueExplorer 5.x though, so I stick with the latest 4.x version. I can get 5.x to run, but the UI is too buggy to be viable for me.

I've also found that installing QueueExplorer through the Bottles flatpak sometimes yields better results for reasons that go over my head.