For those with Intel-equipped Macs, you can run Internet Explorer with Wine in much the same method as Linux users do.
A guy named Mike Kronenberg made this possible. The process involves installing X11 and Darwine. I haven’t tried this (all I’ve got is a G4 Mac), but it’s worth exploring if, for some reason, you need a version of IE past the final one that Microsoft released for the Mac (5.2 or something of that sort). I’d love to see this for PowerPC, but I’m not optimistic.
The Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy install on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) performed admirably for its first few months, but after a couple weeks of inactivity I had trouble during a software update. Everything slowed to a crawl. Apt and Aptitude worked, but any other kind of package management (Add/Del Programs, Synaptic) slowed the system to point that the only way to regain control was a hard reset.
So I reinstalled Gutsy from scratch. Gone was the Feisty-era kernel that expertly managed the $0 Laptop’s CPU fan, and this install started exhibiting the same sludgy symptoms almost immediately.
Did a recent update break Gutsy?
I found no evidence to support this from the Ubuntu forums, nor anywhere else.
But I wanted to install wine and Internet Explorer the easy way, and even that wasn’t working in Gutsy.
Then I broke my vow to stop dual- and triple-booting and put Slackware 12 in my last available partition. I purposefully installed LILO, and could boot Slackware from the $0 Laptop for the first time. And while I got X working with the frame-buffer version of xorg.conf, resolution was way less than optimal. It was probably running at 16 colors. Still, Slackware — even in KDE — was very, very fast. Had I been able to get X right, I would’ve been tempted to turn the entire laptop over to Slackware.
I tried every xorg.conf that Slackware had in /etc/X11. I tried both the whole file plus the monitor portions of xorg.conf files from Ubuntu 7.10, Debian 4.0 and Puppy 3.00. Nope.
Then it was time to reinstall Ubuntu. I did the only reasonable thing. I put Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty in the No. 1 slot. That brought back GRUB, and I was able to boot Ubuntu — running fine now — and Debian. But the GRUB entries for Slackware? None of them work. Kernel panic on all. Then I replaced references to sda with hda. Two got farther than that, but I was left with blank screens and no login prompt. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to set GRUB to successfully boot Slackware 12.
Here’s what I had:
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-generic-2.6.21.5 root=/dev/hda5
savedefault
boot
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-generic-smp-2.6.21.5-smp root=/dev/hda5
savedefault
boot
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-huge-2.6.21.5 root=/dev/hda5 ro vga=791
savedefault
boot
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-2.6.21.5-smp root=/dev/hda5
savedefault
boot
Next thing I’ll try: adding initrd lines to see if that gets it going.
I’m not ready to give up on Slackware via GRUB yet, but does it have to be so damn hard?
Here’s the deal. We’ve got a Mac at home … and my two Linux-equipped laptops. This Old PC in the Back Room has no Internet connectivity at present. And the university where Ilene teaches changed their online administrative portal from one that works in Firefox to one that … does not. It requires Internet Explorer, version 5.5 or greater. That even leaves out the last version of IE that Microsoft deigned to produce for Mac’s OS X.
I returned to the easiest way to get Internet Explorer (and the Wine tools required to run it and many other Windows apps). That would be IEs4Linux.
By following the Ubuntu-specific instructions, I was able to get wine, cabextract and all the relevant files to install IE 5.5 and IE 6 on my Gutsy setup. Yep, Gusty is still giving me trouble with any package-management program that isn’t apt or Aptitude, but since I have those two at my disposal still, I’m sticking with this install for awhile.
Anyway, even though the process involves changing the repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list, then downloading, unpacking and installing from a tarball, it’s all laid out. My advice: go to the page and use copy and past to get the exact code into your terminal window.
There are also distro-specific instructions for: Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Suse, Mandriva and PCLinuxOS.
In short, if you need IE, this works. And you now have Wine, with which you can experiment with other Windows apps on your Linux box. It’s trial and error (mostly error) in my limited experience; for heavy duty use of Wine, I recommend Code Weavers, which costs money but is probably well worth it.
As I’ve previously written, my first “experiment” will be getting IrfanView running under Linux. Sadly, there is nothing — NOTHING — on Linux to equal IrfanView when it comes to image editing — or at least the kind of image editing I do.
Here’s the deal. We’ve got a Mac at home … and my two Linux-equipped laptops. This Old PC in the Back Room has no Internet connectivity at present. And the university where Ilene teaches changed their online administrative portal from one that works in Firefox to one that … does not. It requires Internet Explorer, version 5.5 or greater. That even leaves out the last version of IE that Microsoft deigned to produce for Mac’s OS X.
I returned to the easiest way to get Internet Explorer (and the Wine tools required to run it and many other Windows apps). That would be IEs4Linux.
By following the Ubuntu-specific instructions, I was able to get wine, cabextract and all the relevant files to install IE 5.5 and IE 6 on my Gutsy setup. Yep, Gusty is still giving me trouble with any package-management program that isn’t apt or Aptitude, but since I have those two at my disposal still, I’m sticking with this install for awhile.
Anyway, even though the process involves changing the repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list, then downloading, unpacking and installing from a tarball, it’s all laid out. My advice: go to the page and use copy and past to get the exact code into your terminal window.
There are also distro-specific instructions for: Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Suse, Mandriva and PCLinuxOS.
In short, if you need IE, this works. And you now have Wine, with which you can experiment with other Windows apps on your Linux box. It’s trial and error (mostly error) in my limited experience; for heavy duty use of Wine, I recommend Code Weavers, which costs money but is probably well worth it.
As I’ve previously written, my first “experiment” will be getting IrfanView running under Linux. Sadly, there is nothing — NOTHING — on Linux to equal IrfanView when it comes to image editing — or at least the kind of image editing I do.
Here’s a great tutorial on how to configure Wine to run iTunes in Linux.
Wine — the Linux emulation program that allows you to run Windows apps without running the Windows OS itself is notoriously difficult to run successfully, and tutorials like this are a great help. While there are other ways to manage music on the iPod under Linux (Amarok comes to mind), it makes sense to have iTunes as a choice.
And for those who really don’t want to get their hands dirty with Wine, Codeweavers’ Crossover Linux automates the nasty bits of the Wine experience and costs only $39.99. Well worth it. And there’s a trial version so you don’t have to fork over the money until you know it works.
But if you do want to learn the ways of Wine (and not pay anything, ever). the tutorial above is a great way to get started.
Other Windows apps that generally run under Wine: Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Photoshop. So if you’re somehow wedded to the commercial apps over the free alternatives (OpenOffice, KOffice, Firefox, the GIMP), you can have your free OS cake and eat it, too, with Wine.
I made some progress — and some discoveries — today with my Xubuntu 7.04 Feisty installation on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client.
First of all, can we all agree that the GIMP, in its heaviness, doesn’t really fit in with the Xubuntu philosophy of lighter apps for a lighter window manager?
And with this heaviness in mind, today I installed my first Debian package — mtPaint, which despite having greater capabilities than GNU Paint while being as quick to load, is not available as a Ubuntu package, either in Universe, Multiverse, or any other ‘verse. I found it and downloaded it from the Web, then clicked on it to install. I couldn’t figure out how to add it to the Applications menu, but I was able with Xfce to create a desktop shortcut.
Incidentally, I did try out GNU Paint, which is a Ubuntu-approved application, and quite nice for what it does, except that it can’t resize images, which is the main thing I need an image-editing program to do.
But the result is that I have, indeed, installed a Debian package in Xubuntu, and it couldn’t have been easier. I’ll look into getting mtPaint into the Graphics menu under Applications — how hard can it be? But another thing I did learn is that while the GIMP is torturously slow to load, and probably is quite a memory hog on this 256 MB box, once you have it loaded, it’s not any slower or faster at actually processing images. I didn’t detect any speed boost using mtPaint … except for the fact that it loads in about 3 seconds … as opposed to the GIMP’s 60 or so seconds.
The other thing I did was add Wine and Internet Explorer 6 in my quest to do work on Dailynews.com in Linux. Wine is about as mysterious to me as it gets, but I did go into the Ubuntu Multiverse (or whatever ‘verse it is) and install Wine from the Synaptic Package Manager. As an aside, it’s interesting that besides Synaptic, there’s the Add/Remove Programs utility, and I almost prefer it to Synaptic at this early stage.
Back to Wine: I installed Wine from Synaptic and then used IES4Linux to get Internet Explorer into the Wine world. I did this successfully once before with Xubuntu when running it as a live CD, so I knew that this worked. I had IE6 on my desktop, and it actually worked. And while I was able to use the Daily News Web-publishing software (which is browser-based and requires IE), that system is so buggy that I really couldn’t run it under Wine due to repeated crashes. The problem is more ours than Wine’s, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. I tried to install some other publishing software under Wine by moving entire directories from my Windows box to the Xubuntu box, but nothing would run. I’ll have to delve further into Wine to see exactly what I need to do. It may be a lost cause, but I’m not expecting much. Still, I’m not above giving Codeweavers a try.
That said, it was only with the IES4Linux package that I got Internet Explorer at all. I wish I didn’t have to use it at all, because sticking with Linux-specific browsers and not dealing with Wine at all is a whole lot easier than the alternative.
And what about the 256 MB memory ceiling of this thin client? Some commenters said that it’s not an enviable position, to be with this little memory. All I can say at this point is that while there’s been quite a bit of use of the swap partition on the hard drive, the system hasn’t gone down once, even with all the stress I’m putting on it.
I spent the day upgrading my new Xubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) installation to Xubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), and since Xubuntu is derived from Ubuntu, far and away the most popular Linux distribution for the desktop, I expected — and still expect — a lot more from it.
During my nearly month-long Thin Puppy Torture Test (chronicled extensively in this blog), I managed to get quite a bit of work done with my Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (1 GHz VIA processor, 256 MB RAM, no disk drives at all), most of it related to producing this and other Daily News blogs. From extensive Web surfing to light photo editing, heavy writing and use of Movable Type for Web publishing, Puppy Linux 2.14 performed admirably, even if, along the way, I lost the ability to mount external drives and couldn’t really deal with large audio files due to the lack of available memory. But for the basics, Puppy did the job, day in and day out.
With Xubuntu, I hooked up a 14.4 GB hard drive and a 32x CD-RW drive. And by the time I installed Xubuntu, I expected to get even more real work done. This time I seek to up the ante, doing work for Dailynews.com, which entails working with larger photo files (downloaded from services such as GettyImages.com and WireImage.com, although the latter offers a choice of smaller images to begin with).
And eventually, it means, installing some version of Wine (allowing use of Windows programs without the Windows OS installed), with Internet Explorer 6 running, because the Daily News Web publishing system requires IE. (And for the love of God, WHY??)
As far as text editors go, I can use just about anything. Even the anemic Mousepad editor that comes with Xubuntu would be OK, even though I prefer Geany, and even EditPad for Windows. And since Xubuntu’s word processor, AbiWord is so light on resources and quick-loading, that could really serve as a text editor for my purposes.
And when it came to image editing, Xubuntu offers the GIMP, which though part of the GNOME office suite (featuring the loosely tied-together AbiWord, Gnumeric for spreadsheets and the GIMP), is a true resource hog, taking a full minute to load in Xubuntu on my 1 GHz box. For my purposes at least, I’m very familiar with the GIMP, as I’ve been using the Windows version for at least a year (and never having used Photoshop, had nothing to “unlearn”). So already the GIMP is a mismatch for Xubuntu, if indeed one is running it on “low-spec” hardware. I missed mtPaint from Puppy (which I just might install for Xubuntu, if I can figure it out), but I didn’t miss the paint program that comes with Damn Small Linux, which doesn’t do nearly what I need.
Long story short, I did work on about five photos for Dailynews.com, but the times required to save them in the GIMP really had me thinking about whether or not Xubuntu on this platform could handle this level of work. But I had to stop myself. I don’t recall working with original images this big in Puppy 2.14. I mostly took images already sized for the Web and then made them even smaller. Even the GIMP in Xubuntu could make relatively quick work of that. And as far as general Web work with Firefox in Xubuntu, it went smoothly. I was even able to add the Flash plug-in for Firefox without working up a geekish sweat (translation: no command line needed, no Synaptic Package Manager, just clicking in the bar on Firefox to get the needed plug-in — it was positively Windows-like).
When I write my full-length review of Xubuntu, I’ll recount my odyssey of getting network printing working. Yes, it did take me most of the day, and yes, I’m surprised at how unintuitive Xubuntu’s printer-configuration utility actually is (I gave up and used the CUPS interface), and I’m shocked that I got printing working much, much easier in both Puppy and DSL (and MepisLite … and Slax and Knoppix and even standard Ubuntu Dapper). But that’s another battle to recount on another day.
Suffice it to say that my first full day with Xubuntu Feisty was maybe a bit less bumpy than expected, especially given the high expectations I have for something that’s billed as a speedier version of the hottest desktop Linux distribution on the planet — however dubious such a distinction may be.
But in my search for answers on whether or not Xubuntu and its Xfce desktop interface is truly ready for real work (or at least for what it is that I do to put out Web pages and newspapers), I’m going to have to compare it to Zenwalk 4.4.1, which features the same interface but is built upon Slackware, as opposed to Ubuntu/Xubuntu’s base of Debian. And I’ll have to do a traditional hard-drive install of Puppy to see how it performs in that kind of traditional install (and whether that kind of setup allows me to deal with the kinds of large files that I do, in fact, have to process during the course of my day).
And last … and only least if you think of it that way … I will do a standard Windows 2000 install on the 1 GHz thin client (because I’ve got a 2000 disc and not one with XP on it) … load it up with the requisite open-source apps (Open Office, AbiWord, the GIMP, Avast antivirus, Firefox, even SeaMonkey) to have a truly well-played field on the same hardware before drawing any definite conclusions in the battle for OS supremacy on my low-spec desktop. And honestly, as I work on this entry at home on an iBook G4 1 GHz/384MB laptop with OS X 10.3.9, and seeing how well it runs, I can’t leave Apple and its BSD-derived operating system out of the equation.
Slax is a live CD that I’ve been very anxious to try. Any distro that claims to be light on hardware — yet features the KDE desktop — is something I’ve got to try. I’m beginning to think KDE gets a bad rap. It runs pretty darn well in this distro, as well as in MepisLite. And I think KOffice is a terrific package, with KWrite being one of the best programs out there for writers.
First things first. Slax is a cutdown version of Slackware, one of the first Linux distributions, and one that remains wildly popular (it’s No. 10 on Distrowatch). And it’s not Debian, if that means anything. I guess I mention that because so many distros use Debian as their base, it’s nice to try something different.
The boot process is pretty good. The script displayed on the screen asks you to log on as root with password “toor” And there are on-screen hints, such as startx to get KDE running, flux to use Fluxbox instead, mc to run Midnight Commander and xconf to autoconfigure the graphics adapter. Startx didn’t work for me — my display didn’t cooperate, so I killed X and used xconf, which did work. I got the message, “creating /etc/corg.conf … all done. Run startx now. If you get black screen, hit Ctrl+Alt+Plus. But all was well, and I was off and running. Later, I changed resolutions in KDE, and the screen looked absolutely terrific in all its 1280 x 1024 majesty. Thanks, KDE!
And if you want to put Slax on your hard drive, slax-install will do just that. Configsave and configrestore will save and restore your file systems,
fileswap will create a swap file. Pretty simple.
Once Slax KillBill goes into KDE, you see a yellow desktop and samurai sword that means you’re in KillBill — named because Wine is included and you can run Windows apps without Win being installed (hence the “Kill Bill” — as in Gates — reference).
On the menu, in addition to the KDE button that can launch just about everything, there is a console button, Konqueror, JuK (music), KPlayer (video??) and K3B for CD and DVD burning.
I easily configured my ethernet card for static IP with KDE — it was as clear and easy as any other distro I’ve used.
While KillBill has Wine installed, I couldn’t manage to get any Win apps to run. Perhaps I’m missing something? I’ll try again later.
Another thing: The version of KWord in Slax killbill is 1.5.2, with KDE 3.5.4. I some trouble getting “smart” quotes working — it just wouldn’t do it. I didn’t have this problem in MepisLite, the distro in which I fell in love with KWord. The “current” version of KWord is 1.6.2, so maybe this is a bug that got squashed.
The KDE desktop in Slax killbill is surprisingly responsive. Menus appear immediately (this being a 3 GHz Dell, I expect that, but I don’t always get it).
And I got a nice surprise: Many printers on my network were automatically configured and usable without me doing anything. I was able to print to one immediately … I wasn’t able to configure an additional printer, but I didn’t spend a lot of time on it, since I could print elsewhere.
KDE is such a nice desktop — the screen resize and rotate button on the lower right allowed me to immediately pick my favored resolution — 1280 x 1024, and as I said above, it looks terrific.
I still love KWord. It’s my favorite Linux word processor by far. It’s much lighter on resources than Open Office, and I’ve read that it’s even lighter than Abiword.
KDE’s Konquerer browser responds fast and displays pages well. There was no Flash player installed, though.
Sound worked fine. I had to tweak it with ALSA Mixer in a terminal window, but that’s normal for my PC.
At this stage, the sticking points are the smart quotes in Kword, and for the killbill edition, figuring out how Wine works. (Wine remains a mystery to me. The only time I could do anything with Wine was when I installed IEs4Linux in Xubuntu — that worked. Now I see why Codeweavers has a business.)
Maybe I need to run Winecfg or something. The reason I burned the KillBill version of Slax first was because one of my goals in running Linux is to port over the two Windows apps that I need at the Daily News — Internet Explorer (because our in-house Web system requires it — and no, Firefox won’t work) and the Hermes publishing system from Unisys, which is our main software for putting out the paper. I’m not against giving $40 to Codeweavers to make it happen, but I figured that a distro with Wine in it already would somehow be easier to use.
Still, my first impression of Slax is a favorable one. I’ve already burned CDs of the plain Slax and the smaller Popcorn edition, meant to install on 128 MB flash media. I’ll try these in the Dell, and hopefully soon in the Thin Puppy (the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client I’m using to write this post). If it works, will I have to rename that machine Thin Slax? Yes, I will.
First of all, I love that song.
Second of all, the Wine emulation program for Linux, which enables users to run Windows apps in Linux without needing Windows at all, is notoriously difficult to install. In fact, there’s a whole company — and resulting software package — called Codeweavers to make to process doable for those who aren’t full-time geeks.
Now I need to run Internet Explorer for one task — yes, it’s a freakin’ pain in the ass — and have had no success in installing Wine on any Linux distribution.
But I came across IEs4Linux, which claims to offer a way to get Wine and IE into your Linux distribution with minimal effort.
It took a small bit of doing, about 5 minutes work — and you have to open a terminal window.
But it works.
I installed in Xubuntu, using the instructions herein.
In a few minutes, I had a working IE 6 window on the screen. So if you absolutely, positively need to use IE, want to run Linux and can’t seem to get Wine working otherwise, I heartily recommend this method — again, it worked for me.
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