[NTLUG:Discuss] [Fwd: Tax filing in Linux? How-to...]

[David Simmons, PE]

Here's some info I thought neat & you'd enjoy - Dave

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For the sake of advocasy, and to get them to open it up to Linux users, 
everyone should submit their comment that YOU would like to use Turbo Tax... 
Just so they get the idea of how much money they could be 'Lusing'!  Here:

 http://support.turbotax.com/turbotax/ecs/main/index.html

When will they learn to serve the huge number of Linux users?  We don't 
usually purchase computers with Linux pre-installed, so, My purchase of 
components to build 68 computing boxes are not part of the Microsoft FUD 
about 'marketshare'.   They are not 'registered', at all!  They all run 
GNU/Linux, Debian.  BUT, THERE IS HOPE, temporarily:
  
Turbo Tax works in Firefox, no matter the OS you are using, here is how:
         http://www.shaftek.org/blog/archives/000223.html

"Upon further digging with wget, I ran across a JavaScript file that 
TurboTax's used to check browser versions. To my chagrin I found a comment 
inside the filw stating that "Unix/Linux browsers are not supported". On the 
brighter side, I also found support for FireFox. Knowing that FireFox is 
basically identical on all platforms, I decided to try using Chris Pederick's 
UserAgent Switcher extension for FireFox. I loaded it into my browser, set 
the user agent to "IE on Windows XP" and voila it worked. For a moment. 
Unfortunatly, TurboTax really thought that I was using IE and it tried 
loading ActiveX which of course did not work. At this point I decided that 
the best solution is faking Firefox on Windows which is clearly supported 
from the JavaScript file. I tried it and it actually worked!

To get TurboTax to work on your system, do the following:
1. Install FireFox if you haven't already (for RPMs check pbone.net).
2. Install the User Agent Switcher extension (if you get security warning, 
follow the prompts to add the site to your list of trusted site for 
installing software).
3. Restart FireFox, and go to "Tools", "User Agent Switcher", "Options", 
"Options". In the options box choose "User Agents" and click "Add" to add a 
new agent with the following settings:

Description: FireFox 1.0 (Windows XP)
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) 
Gecko/20041109 Firefox/1.0
App Name: Netscape
App Version: 5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041109 
Firefox/1.0
Platform: Win32

4. Install Adobe Acrobat Reader and connect it to FireFox if you want to print 
your return (also see this)."    
      http://www.shaftek.org/blog/archives/000223.html