Slashdot Mirror
Running Solaris IE Binaries in FreeBSD?
Hugh asks: "I work for a company that requires all its employees to use Internet Explorer, but they have no problem with "alternative" operating systems. As such, I would like to run FreeBSD but because there is no BSD IE binary, I would need to run the Solaris binary. BSD has a great Solaris compatibility layer, but I have not had any success getting it to work with IE. I was wondering if anyone else had any input on the topic?"
Presumably you are running FreeBSD on an x86 box. How good will your binary compatibility be with IE for Solaris when you can only get it for sparc?
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
Your company sounds clueless. There's no sensible reason to enforce a certain browser. And *certainly* no even halfway sensible reason to allow any OS the user wants, but still insist on a spesific browser.
IE on Solaris is a complete dog. And it won't work any *better* even if you manage to by some kludge make it work under some other unix. Exporting it over the network with X11 works, but seriously, what's it all for ? Why can't you just use a browser that works on your OS ? Mozilla ?
I'd ask my boss for the reason for such an idiotic policy. If the answer is not satisfactory, go work for someone who actually has a clue. You'll only regret working for idiots in the long term anyway.
Do they actually check the logs to see which browsers are going out or just come and look over your shoulder?
If it's the latter, then you might want to consider theming Mozilla to look like IE. This might save you a great deal of hassle and make the browser considerable more responsive!
www.abstractec.co.uk
Which would be an IE "replicant" theme, for the visuals, coupled with modified headers etc. for complete simulation of IE. I would personally take a crack at this, but I have not been able to find out how to even write themes for mozilla (go ahead - try a web search and see if you come up with a HOWTO - I'd be delighted if it were posted). Unless your company is using some ocx controls, or just has lame javascript, or applets with depracated java, most stuff should work acceptably or very well in Mozilla - yes folks, it's now that good. Galeon is excellent too, but no plug-ins seem to be in it.
The obvious answer . . . .
if you're already ready to try emulating another platform, why dont you just go all out and use wine. it will allow you to use the ie that the company has most likely tested all their websites with.
that isnt to say that a stealth mode mozilla isnt a cool idea.
Is VNC a possibility? Before I had IE for Sparc on my workstation, I VNC'd over to a laptop and did my work from my UNIX workstation.
As an aside, I use IE for Solaris (on Sparc) for those pesky few corporate web pages which require IE. For everything else, I'm still using netscape. (Also, the IE for Sparc also now includes Outlook!)
About the BSD compatibility thing... was that a Solaris library compatibility, or SPARC processor and Solaris library compatibility? I'm just wondering if it only works for Solaris code on Intel.
Hate to turn this into a help-me post, but I have never suceeded starting IE for Solaris (both 5.6 and 5.8). The program just sort of runs but no GUI thingy comes out.
Any help here?
Actually, Galeon seems to support any plugins that Mozilla does. I'm running Galeon 1.0 (with Mozilla 0.96) on Linux, and I have both the Flash player and the blackdown Java plugin enabled in both Mozilla and Galeon. All you need to do is set them up to work in Mozilla, and they "automagically" work in Galeon.
If you're expecting to run the actual binaries, your outta luck. What you CAN do though is 'back display' it if you have solaris running on another box on your network, or even under VMWare (notice, I havent tried Solaris under VMWare, don't even know if its possible).
On your box with the XServer (FreeBSD in this case):
$xhost +solaris.box.ip.here
On the Solaris box:
$DISPLAY=insert.your.ip.here:0
$export DISPLAY
$./ie &
It should display on your FreeBSD Xserver just like you want. I have done this for quite a while to get the HP/UX version of IE running on an Apollo 735 to display on my Linux box. A fast network is obviously preferred.
Toodles
Toodles D. Clown
Agreed that IE for Solaris is flaky. But compare it to the alternatives! A couple years ago, I was working for a Solaris-only company where a lot internal docs (meeting minutes, project plans, etc.) were written in HTML. At the time my choices were Netscape 4.0 and IE. Solaris Netscape crashed a lot, and had some silly limitations. (Hello! Page numbers on printouts are a basic feature!) So I used IE. Had problems of its own, but still better than Netscape. If I were there now, I'd probably want to switch to Konqueror -- but there are still pages that the K can't render correctly!
Check out Chameleon Last I checked it looked quite good!
Just use opera with it identifying itself as IE!
unless there is another underlying reason for using IE perhaps active-x controls or something...how about wine with the win binary of ie?
Companies that are Windows 2000 shops will require IE, because MS Proxy servers in native mode will only authenticate with IE or with a proxy client (only available for Windows)
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Codeweavers has a plugin for netscape that allows you to run Windows plugins... including ActiveX plugins (If thats why you need IE). Since Mozilla, Galeon, and Konqueror can all use netscape plugins, you can use the codeweavers plugin with all of them.
i'm using freebsd 4.4 and mozilla is a crash-maker. . . use konkeror. :)