Use Mozilla Firefox under WINE to reach those Windows-only sites
Posted by solipsistic on 08 Oct 2007 at 06:42 pm | Tagged as: linux, wine
Its long been known that you can use something like the User Agent Switcher to make it appear like you’re using a different operating system than you really are. This can be useful on some websites that insist you need to run Windows – when in fact Linux or practically any other operating system will work fine.
But for those sites that are actually telling the truth, you can often run Firefox under WINE with very good results. Just head over to www.getfirefox.com and download the Windows binary. The site actually does its own OS detection, so you’ll probably want to choose “Other Systems and Languages.” Once you have it, make sure you have WINE installed. I also installed the MS truetype fonts because it looks terrible otherwise.
# apt-get install wine msttcorefonts
And then start the installer
$ wine Firefox\ Setup\ 2.0.0.7.exe
You’ll go through the normal install process, and when you’re finished you’ll see a new Firefox icon on your Linux desktop:
Double-click it and you should be good to go! If you want to visit a site with audio, you’ll want to run winecfg, visit the Audio tab, choose your settings (I just left the defaults) and click Apply. Otherwise you might run into some issues with Firefox crashing. If its any consolation, Firefox will crash on certain sites powered by Move Networks in Windows, too, if there is no audio driver installed. This is probably related to the Firefox extension you must install to view the site.
I recently tested using Firefox 3.0.13 and WINE 1.1.27 to stream content from ABC/Fox/etc and it’s not working.
So I’ve been trying to get this issue addressed by someone that has the capability to get through to movenetworks – since they haven’t provided the “promised” Linux client from a year ago.
I’ve also submitted a story to digg at http://digg.com/linux_unix/Mr_Obama_s_DNC_speeches_BLOCKED_from_LINUX_by_movenetworks , please have a look to see many links that provide more information on this issue.
In the comments at the digg article above, you will find many more links to stories where Linux users are not happy with this seemingly intentional blockage of the GNU/Linux operating system from online media.
Linux users need to come together on this or we are going to get blocked even further from online streaming TV.
Submit your complaints to the FCC / DOJ – Antitrust / your Congressman / whitehouse (dot ) gov / local media providers / etc.
If anyone has another way to attack this problem – by all means, please comment.
THIS ISSUE IS HIGH PRIORITY because it is a potential barrier for people to switch to Linux from other operating systems.