Background -

Tally.ERP9 is a widely used program in India for accounting needs by many small to medium enterprises. Tally Being very cost effective, accurate & easy to operate, there is a huge user base for Tally.ERP9 especially in India. Tally.ERP9 officially supports only windows environment & there is no Linux version available for the same.

Challenges for Linux users -

• No support to Linux is one huge limitation with Tally.ERP9.

• Moreover Tally.ERP9 does not provide any (.xls) data export support via Libreoffice.

• Wine does not provide LAN access to wine installed applications. Thus accessing Tallyserver (running on Windows machine) through LAN becomes difficult.

• Because of these limitations implementing Tally.ERP9 in Windows + Linux environment becomes difficult & Linux user is forced to shift on Windows for sole purpose of accessing Tally.ERP9.

Scope of the Tutorial -

• Installing Tally.ERP9 as a ‘client’ on Linux Mint – Using Playonlinux --> Wine

• Accessing Tally Server running on other windows machine which is in LAN –Mounting tally server ‘data’ directory on Linux machine & accessing it by Tally client

• Installing MS office 2003 EXCEL so as data export from tally is possible – Using Playonlinux --> Wine

Prerequisites -

1. You have a valid Tally Multiple user License (Gold / Silver)

2. TallyERP server is running on a windows machine (e.g.- ‘Tallyserver’)

3. The said windows machine is assigned on a LAN network with a fixed ip address (e.g.- 192.168.1.18)

4. Get to know the exact port of TallyERP server (e.g. - 9999) & ODBC (e.g. - 9000)

5. Linux machine (on which you want to install Tally Client) is able to access LAN network & Windows machine ‘Tallyserver’ is mountable (check by opening File Manager --> Network --> Windows Network ---> Tallyserver)

6. The Tally Data folder (which is used to store company database having folder names like 10000 , 10001 etc.) is shared with linux machine which is mountable & writeable. (e.g.- F:\Tally\data on 192.168.1.18 Tallyserver machine)

7. Linux machine is having internet connectivity with appreciable speed (during the installation process, you might need to download stuff like wine versions, mono, gecko, windows fonts, libraries etc.)

8. Tally.ERP9 complete installer (setup.exe) , MS office 2003 set up files with serial key should be available [ we will recommend to save these both set up .exe files in your /home/(YourUserName)/Downloads folder]

9. In this tutorial we are using Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon (64 bit) ; Tally.ERP9 ver 4.93 ; Playonlinux Ver 4.2.10

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Lets begin,

Step 1 – Install required software

From your Linux Mint 18 machine Open synaptic package manager & install following packages (If you do not have those already)

playonlinux , wine , winetricks , mono-runtime , mono-complete , cifs-utils , nemo

Step 2 – Creating a folder for mounting tally data

Go to your home folder --> create a new folder (e.g. - TallyDATA)

Inside that folder create one more folder (e.g. MountPoint). The folder path should look like -

/home/(YourUserName)/TallyDATA/MountPoint

This will be used in step 5 , where we will be mapping above path in wine as drive D:\

Step 3 – Mounting Tallyserver located data folder on previously created MountPoint folder

Open fstab as adminstrator

in terminal (considering nemo as your file manager)-

sudo nemo /etc/fstab

In the fstab text file after the last line, add following line [ only after editing your relevant folder locations / user name / password. Here we have considered the tally data location on server as //192.168.1.18/f/Tally/data   replace it with your relevant location in the text line below ]

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#For Tally Data :

//192.168.1.18/f/Tally/data /home/(YourUserName)/TallyDATA/MountPoint cifs username=(YourUserName),password=(YourPassword),rw,nounix,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

Note:- If Windows folder name has spaces, cifs will not mount it & will give error.

The solution is to replace the space by \040 e.g. you want to mount folder My Company enter its name as My\040Company

In case of above example, it should look like;

//192.168.1.18/f/Tally/data/My\040Company

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Save the file and close it.

In the Terminal -

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sudo mount -a

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Check the mount is successful -

Navigate to /home/(YourUserName)/TallyDATA/MountPoint and inside the folder you should see the data folders from tally server [like 10000 , 10001 etc]

Step 4 – Installing Wine Versions on playonlinux

Open PlayOnLinux

Go to Tools --> Manage Wine Versions --- (tab Wine version x86) ---> from the list of available wine versions install the latest version & optionally other versions like 1.1.26 , 1.6.2 , 1.7.55, 2.0-stagging etc.

[ We are installing multiple wine versions because if Tally is not running of your latest version then we can easily try other version latter on ]

This download will take a while as it will install relevant dependencies as well.

Step 5 – Preparing virtual drive for installation of Tally.ERP9

In PlayOnLinux

Go to Configure --> New --> Select 32 bit virtual drive creation --> Select latest version of wine --> Give name to new virtual drive as Tally ---> It should also install relevant mono & Gecko packages.

The drive creation will take a while.

Once drive creation is complete, new drive Tally should be seen in PlayOnlinux Configuration.

Click on drive Tally , Go to tab Wine --> Configure Wine --> (wine config window will open up) --> go to tab Drives --> Add --> Select Drive name D: --> Set the path as /home/(YourUserName)/TallyDATA/MountPoint --> Apply -->OK

Step 6 – Installing Tally.ERP9

Open PlayOnLinux --> Install a program --> Install a non listed program --> select ‘Edit or update existing application --> click on show virtual drive – (virtual drive Tally should be seen) next --> click on install some libraries ---> select 32 bits -- > Install libraries ( POL_Function_OverrideDLL ; POL_Gettool_Samba3 ; POL_Function_Fontssmooth (BGR / Greyscale/RGB; Windows Core fonts)

It will download relevant software / fonts ... will take a while. When libraries are completed;

Select install file to run --> browse --> go to /home/(YourUserName)/Downloads/     [where you have kept tally setup.exe file]        --> next --> you will be guided through Tally installation setup.

Install tally as Tally Client.

When tally Installation is complete it will ask you to configure tally data path, which you can set now as - D:\ [as we have set it in step 2]

and server and port details which you can set which are relevant to you [ e.g. 192.168.1.18 & port 9999 ] ---> IMPORTANT Tally may suggest you some ip & port where tallyserver is running, but that information is not always accurate & thus will give an error in later phase. Thus its better if you actually know your server IP & Port.

Click next and let your installation complete. Tally should successfully recognise your license and in a while will also show up your companies ! Go on using tally as usual.

Create PlayOnLinux shortcut of tally.exe on your desktop, so you need to just click on that icon to start next time.

Congratulations you have successfully installed TallyERP9 client on Linux.

Only limitation of this method is after every boot of you need to remount tally data folder using terminal command   sudo mount -a   followed by running Tally.ERP9

OR you can achieve it automatically using GUI by adding command gksudo mount -a  in your startup applications. By this way you will be asked for password for mounting locations whenever you boot up your machine.

Step 7 – Installing MS Office 2003

Open PlayOnLinux ---> Install a program --> Install a non listed program --> select ‘Edit or update existing application --> click on show virtual drive – (virtual drive Tally should be seen) next --> click on install some libraries ---> select 32 bits -- > Install libraries ( POL_Function_OverrideDLL ; POL_Gettool_Samba3 ; POL_Function_Fontssmooth (BGR / Greyscale/RGB); Windows Core fonts

It will download relevant software / fonts ... will take a while. When libraries are completed;

Select install file to run --> browse --> go to /home/(YourUserName)/Downloads/ where you have kept MS Office 2003 setup file , select setup.exe --> next --> you will be guided through MS office 2003 installation setup

While installing Office we prefer to install only EXCEL by manually selecting custom installation. As only EXCEL is useful for exporting tally data, there is no need to bloat your system by installing complete office suite.

Once installation of excel is complete & desktop shortcut is created, click on icon to run EXCEL for first time (sometimes it might look freezed at welcome screen of EXCEL but the key is, to add your user details in the window eclipsed behind frozen welcome screen, by moving that eclipsed window to a side.)

Once you add your details, EXCEL runs as if its working in windows.

Try to export some report in .xls format. You will see excel is opening and report is nicely getting exported. This file you can save & later on open with Libreoffice.

Enjoy using Tally.ERP9 on Linux Mint 18 !