eTax 2006 and Wine 0.9.23

It’s almost the end of ‘it’s that time of year’ again… tax time. This was my first year doing a tax return as a full-time employee, and was pretty damn frustrating, more than usual. I think I will need to write to the tax office with an ammendment .

Anyway, this year I decided to do my tax return with Xubuntu. The tax office only supplies their eTax program for Windows, but I figured, if this isn’t a good opportunity to use Wine I don’t know what is.

Wine is dead easy to install …

Just backup and edit the apt-get sources list

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list_backup
sudo mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add the Ubuntu specific Wine repository (Dapper of course)

deb-src http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main

Then install Wine with your preference of apt-get interface

sudo apt-get install wine

Then configure Wine and install the program (in this case eTax)

winecfg
wine /downloads/etax2006.exe

As it turned out, eTax installed superbly using Wine, and ran without many of the problems you would expect. I was able to create a new tax data file, and load my previous years data, which was handy. There were no problems filling in the information, from a technical point of view, comprehending tax law aside. The only issues I could determine, were the inability to load the help file, and not being able to see a running estimate of my return.

Printing was another problem, but was sorted by using the CUPS-PDF printer.

I’ll wait to see what comes of my ammendment letter, but it looks like a pretty successful tax reutrn using Wine. If not I don’t have very long to sort it out :$