[K12OSN] Wine, IE6 and Java

[Mark Cockrell]

>
>
>Why, in the name of God, would you ever run that
>> insecure POS on a Linux 
>> system?  Seriously.  Just get Firefox working before
>> someone hacks your 
>> system.
>> 
>  
>
>
>  
>
Yeah, that's exactly the kind of "Microsoft is evil" stuff I was hoping 
to avoid.

>I'll tell you why... At least in Missouri, where I'm
>an educator, the State Department of Education, and
>their "genius" web-programmers, in their infinte
>wisdom have chosen to use propietary (M$) formats for
>their web-apps and file formats, etc...  So when you
>try to access certain pages from Mozilla you will get
>error messages and NOT be able to accomplish your
>tasks.  They ONLY work in IE!  So we are forced to
>have IE on our systems.
>
>  
>
I think we all run into that at some point.  Coders use the "Advanced 
features" (read "Security flaws") of IE to make their stuff work.  In my 
particular case it's for an online testing app.  It doesn't help the 
cause for Open Source Software in my school when I tell a principal "Oh, 
yeah, you can't do that in our new, Linux labs.  You'll have to 
rearrange some class schedules to make use of our Windows labs."  
Avoiding that was the whole reason I installed the K12LTSP labs in the 
first place.  The "It saves you money." argument is moot when you can't 
actually *use* the lab.

>I'd like to know all the details as to how you got IE
>working on your server.  It would sure come in handy
>when we try to access those pages from our Linux labs.
> At this point, I tell the teachers they will have to
>access that from our Windows lab instead.
>  
>
I used WineTools from http://www.von-thadden.de/Joachim/WineTools/  They 
have put together a fairly comprehensive set of installers that let even 
a relative idiot like myself install various Windows programs.  I've 
setup IE6 and Office 2000 in my own .wine directory, and it works when I 
copy it to another user and change the permissions as well.  My hope is 
to set things up and add it to the /etc/skel directory (someone tell me 
if that's a bad idea) and then our users will have access to the various 
Windows apps when they need them. (Access, is another application for 
which many of the Open Source alternatives simply aren't acceptable for 
some specific uses.)

>Anyone know how to get Macromedia Shockwave/Director
>working on Linux boxes?
>
I haven't had any reason to tackle that one yet.

C-ya,
Mark
____
"A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it." -- Bob Hope