Will you port Prism or InStat to Linux? Does Prism work with the Windows emulator Wine?

No plans to create a Linux version of Prism or InStat

Right now, we have no plans to port Prism or InStat to Linux. Because Mac OSX is based on Unix, it seems as though porting to Linux, another flavor of Unix, ought to be easy. Not so. Prism is a very interactive program, and all parts of the user interface would need to get rebuilt for a new platform, as would Prism's interaction with printers and the clipboard.  Polishing Prism for Linux would take  dozens of person-years of effort.

So far, we've only had a few requests per year. While Linux is popular for servers, it is not as popular or standard for desktop use.

When we see as many scientists using Linux on their desktop as now use Macs then we will consider the possibility of creating a Linux version.

Prism under WINE

The idea of WINE is to provide a Windows emulator, so Windows programs will work under Linux.  

One of our users told us in mid-2019 that Prism 8 Windows (64 bit) runs fine under current versions of WINE. Other than some cosmetic issues with icons, he said everything worked fine. Below are his instructions for getting it working. We post this to help others, but GraphPad has not tried to use Wine and cannot provide technical support:

Installation Instructions

1. Create a 64-bit wine prefix (32-bit did not work for me).

2. 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.

3. Finally, run the 64-bit msi Prism installer.

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. 

InStat appears to work OK under WINE

One customer wrote to tell us that InStat 3.10 seems to be useable under WINE 1.01 and Ubuntu 9.10. We have not tested this ourselves, and cannot support Linux or WINE, but it appears to work fine. The InStat demo works for 30 days, so you can try it yourself before purchasing InStat. That person did offer these tips:

• Closing the InStat Helps system often leads InStat to crash with WINE 1.01. To avoid this, leave the InStat Help open until you are done with InStat. Using WINE 1.1.3 resolves this problem.
• The menu bar is sometimes unresponsive. If this happens, click outside InStat and then click on InStat again and the menu will "wake up". 

StatMate appears to work OK under WINE

The only problems appear to be that the Help system won't work at all, and it is not possible to copy-paste the results.