Reinstalling BPT

HMRC provide a handy PAYE program so that we can pay our taxes quickly and accurately. This is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is called HMRC-BPT. I was running it on my main workstation before it crashed.

Obviously, I do a backup each month, to my central server (and it gets copied from there to the backup servers). So there should not have been a problem.

Except that they provide BPT for 32 bit linux. Not 64 bit Fedora linux, which is what I'm running. And then  you try to run the program, it just exits, because it realises that it's on a 64 bit system.

This is bad news - I'll be needing to run this program on June 1, 5 days away. And it's puzzling, because I've been running it on a 64 bit linux for years. And, of course, I dn't remember how several years ago, I got it working.

When I stopped panicking, I realised that, if the worst came to the worst, I could install BPT on the only Windows box that I keep (rather like a tame snake). So I did that, restored my data backup, and it worked. Whew!

But then I tried it on the 64 bit linux box. First, I ran the install program, and to my surprise, that worked. But when I came to run BPT itself, it didn't work.

So I went to the directory where rti.linux lives, and ran that. It helpfully told me that I was missing libm.so.6. So I ferreted around and found a copy of that, put it in place, and tried again. This time, it said that I was missing libsqlite3.so.0. So again, I found a copy of that
and put it into the /usr/lib directory (which is where the 32 bit libraries are). At this point, I was expecting that I'd be going through this procedure several more times. At least.

Then I tried it again, and to my surprise and delight, it worked!

So, if you have a 64 bit Fedora linux system and want to run BPT, don't despair. Even though HMRC don't tell you how to do it, it's actually pretty easy.