[plug] Greetings Pluggers :) >>> Wine && E-Tax

[Julian Clark]

Hi Everyone,

I've just subscribed to the mailing list, and at the recommendation of a 
friend of mine, am just going to share a little of the joy I experienced 
with Wine and the ATO's etax software.

So here's my first post, let's hope that it doesn't bore you too much.

:)

Firstly, a little of the specs of what I am running.
Gentoo Linux (2.4.25 kernel), KDE 3.2 for my Window manager running on a 
box full of the cheapest new hardware I could find at the time. :)

Steps..
Gentoo's install process utilises emerge (debian users think apt-get)
which I utilised to grab the latest unstable  (think not quite 
thoroughly tested) release of wine that Gentoo offers. (at this stage 
wine20040716)

Download the etax2004 executable.
not so bad, apart from the fact that I had to pretend to the ATO that I 
was using Internet Explorer. Funnily, they have a secure site test to 
see if your browser supports SSL, but then the next page takes a peek at 
your user agent string, if your user agent does not say Internet 
explorer 5+, you're given a page of links as to where you can download 
Microsoft security updates. I have no use for those whatsoever. ;)

A cool thing though, they advise mac users to use a windows emulator.
Strange that they don't suggest this for Linux, perhaps this is for the 
lack of IE for Linux. I guess that you COULD run it under wine, but why?


Once I downloaded the executable... I double clicked it..
I was prompted what I wished to run this file with.. to which I typed wine

Presto. The WISE installation wizard came up. I installed to my newly 
created c:\
Wine creates a directory in your home directory called .wine. within 
this exists another directory called dosdevices. This contains folders 
and symbolic links to directories and devices.
this is where the folder c: is located.

The wise installer created a directory c:\etax2004\
I navigated to this directory, found the executable etax2004.exe, double 
clicked it, and chose wine again.

It worked.. smoothly. :)
I was greeted with an ATO screen and subsequently ended up at the point 
of being able to proceed with my tax return.

The first things that I noticed were not working, was all of the 
contextual help hyper links.
I presume that they're meant to fire up Microsoft's help browser, and 
likewise, I didn't have any joy with the help feature itself.

Resizing the window seemed to take a bit of time for etax to catch up, 
it seemed to refresh after I clicked on a back or next buttons.

Progressing through your tax return..
Buttons seem to work properly, It doesn't have any problem adding or 
subtracting. the mechanics of the program seem to work well.
Sometimes in a numeric input field, it seems to not display the numbers, 
I clicked off of those fields and back into them, re-entered the numbers 
and all seemed fine.

Submission::
I'm not sure as yet. I haven't tried testing that functionality. I need 
to clarify a few more things before I submit it. I'll keep you if I make 
any progress with this.

The program seemed as simple to use as it was when I last did my tax 
return on a windows system. Contextual help would've been nice, but even 
considering this lack, I was pleasantly surprised as to how quick and 
easy this whole process was.


if you've any questions, feel free to bash out a query to myself.

Cheers,

Julian Clark