How to install FieldWorks 8.3 now that FW 9.0 is released

[Mark S]

Now that FieldWorks 9.0 has been released as stable, it has replaced FieldWorks 8.3 in the packages.sil.org software repository. But it's still possible to manually download and install FieldWorks 8.3 for Wasta/Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic) and 16.04 (xenial).

(Note: FieldWorks 8.3 is not available for Wasta/Ubuntu 20.04 (focal). But FieldWorks 9.0 is.)

This is a somewhat more advanced activity than normal software installation.

You can follow the instructions in the README.txt file at

http://linux.lsdev.sil.org/downloads/fieldworks-8.3/

I only did some limited testing of this, on Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic). But it appears to work fine, and `sudo apt upgrade` doesn't upgrade from FW 8.3 to FW 9.0 afterward.

This is not the normal way that we publish software, so there may be some additional bumps along the way.

Mark

[Mark S]

Wait, don't do that yet if you have or previously had FieldWorks 9.0 already installed on the same machine. There are a couple gotchas that I need to sort out first.

It seems to be fine tho if you never had FieldWorks 9.0 installed.

[Mark S]

Okay, it should be working. With revised instructions in the README.txt file, FieldWorks 9.0 can be successfully removed and replaced with FieldWorks 8.3.

The steps also work to install FieldWorks 8.3 if no FieldWorks has been installed before.

[mark.simmons94.ms]

This is great, thank you so much!

[Mark S]

You are welcome :-)