Month: May 2007

In my previous post I had written about IE specific websites. Though u may have started using Linux and are really loving u r Firefox browser there are many more who use Windows and Internet Explorer on their systems and such users are the dominant force. Many web developers therefore create IE specific websites and don’t care about the rest non IE users.

This doesn’t mean that u have to throw away u r Linux and go for Windows where IE is available. ies4linux comes to the rescue. It uses WINE and runs IE on top of it. The application comes with a script which does all the job right from downloading the required dlls to installation . No extra configuration needed.

Till the time IE specific websites are created software such as ies4linux would be saving non Windows users from considerable pain.

The only thing almost all non windows users may miss from time to time is Internet Explorer on their systems. Though with Firefox now on the rise this need has gone to a drastically low level but there are some instances when u need IE coz the website which u r visiting may provide some service which simply refuses to work on non IE browsers.

I have found 2 categories where IE is forced on u. One being the use of ActiveX controls on the webpage which simply cannot work on non Windows OS such as Linux. I hope all such service providers provide a desktop version for everybody for their respective OS.

The other category of websites come under lame coder websites who prefer to use VBScript in their webpages instead of Javascript . I simply cannot understand their logic behind this. Just because the developer knows only VBScript is really a pathetic excuse for any body to give. Even Microsoft the inventor of VBScript themselves don’t use Vbscript everywhere and instead use Javascript in many places.

Infact such websites reduce their coverage (in this case non Windows users) and they are the ones to lose finally.

Sorry to disappoint a lot of my friends but WINE in this case is simply another piece of software present in Linux.

The official definition states the following “Wine Is Not a (CPU) Emulator.”

Wine just provides the windows API for u r windows software to run under Linux , It comes as a blessing when u r stuck with the Windows only version of u r favorite software in Linux.

Head on to WINE home at http://www.winehq.org/ for all the info u would ever need about it.

Although its a good attempt but i must say that its still not perfect . Since it tries to emulate Windows API, where there are many undocumented features there are times when not all u r favorite software may run under it as it may be using those undocumented features.

During such times its best to pray that there exists a similar or better version or clone of the software u are suck with. A little bit of Googling helps in almost all such cases though.

Many recent distributions come with the latest stable version of WINE and are also configured to execute Windows executable’s with WINE.

So just click and see u r Windows program’s come alive in Linux with some WINE 🙂 .

This is a common scenario….u have installed Linux. u r really excited about it and immediately start checking out the software, games and other cool things already present in the package. After a certain amount of time (which is directly proportional to the level of u r excitement) u realise that u r not able to find u r games , pictures, documents etc which was present on u r Windows system. You start looking for the panic button.

Relax! U r data is most probably safe , depending upon which options u chose on the partition screen during install time.

For accessing other filesystems u need to “mount” that filesystem in Linux.

Windows uses 2 types of file systems FAT32 and NTFS . If ur Windows data is on a FAT32 partition u needn’t worry much as almost all of the popular Linux distributions have FAT32 support enabled. If u Windows system uses NTFS as its file system then a little bit of extra work is needed.

Read the following info on http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/mounting.html for some information regarding mounting.

For those with NTFS system ,head on to http://www.linux-ntfs.org/and download the required packages for u r system.

Follow the documentation and if everything goes well , u will be having access to u r documents,pictures etc in Linux also.