Helping Move The German Educational System to Linux

The goal of this blag post is to get a legacy software used by teachers to run under Linux. The software is used to put grades of pupils into a database. # Target Software Thanks for reading my highbrow title. To stay in character, I will first mansplain some details about Germany's educational system: Germany consists of a bunch of states. And a funny quirk is that every state can pretty much decide how to do education. I'm explaining this because otherwise the following sentence might sound unnecessary: We will focus on the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) in this post. It might very well be though that it's the same or similar for other states. Anyway: NRW has a website where teachers can download software they might need: svws.nrw.de. Under "SchILD-NRW 2" you can find the download of the software in question. Don't ask me what "SchILD" stands for, but the word "Schild" is German and means "shield". It has nothing to do with The Avengers. Anyway, the download is under https://www.svws.nrw.de/schild-nrw2/schild-nrw2-tools-download in the sub section "Alte externe Verwaltung von Leistungsdaten für Schild-NRW".

e8d311ee6a87ecc68dd479b0a3a3d9469cc044002ea4734e8c151df0f6be054e  ExtNotMod3.exe

Let's use Linux Mint (version 22) to ease the transition from Windows. We will be using Wine to execute the program. I am completely new to Wine. # Wine The following is probably a pretty standard way to install Wine:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

sudo mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq-noble.sources https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/noble/winehq-noble.sources

sudo apt update
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable winetricks

wine --version

This should result in an output like wine-10.0 or so. Now let's use the winetricks helper script to install a couple required dependencies for SchILD-NRW. Let's also set a WINEPREFIX to keep things tidy:

export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-notenmodul
WINEARCH=win32 wineboot --init
winetricks jet40
winetricks mdac28

The above will open a couple of GUI-based installers, do the normal Windows "Yes, Next, Take my Firstborn"-routine. # Done That's it. You should now be able to run the program:

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-notenmodul wine ~/path/to/ExtNotMod3.exe

# Shortcut Bonus points for creating the file ~/.local/share/applications/notenmodul.desktop with the following content (obviously, adjust path names):

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Notenmodul
Comment=SchILD-NRW Externes Notenmodul (via Wine)
Exec=env WINEPREFIX=/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.wine-notenmodul wine /home/YOUR_USERNAME/Notenmodul/ExtNotMod3.exe
Type=Application
Icon=wine
Categories=Education;
Terminal=false

Now you can just start it from the main menu. # AI Disclaimer This section will almost certainly not age well. But it seems to be en-vogue right now to mention when one used AI. I used AI to learn how Wine works, what the error messages meant that I saw, and how to get around them. I did not use AI to write this blag post. In particular I used Opus 4.6 in the Claude Desktop app.