2008-04-30

Seasonal headache: ABBYY eFormFiller 2.5 on Linux

The beginning of May (May 6 this year) is the deadline for income tax declarations in Lithuania. Our tax inspection accepts paper forms, has a lame web interface, and offers a Windows program that looks nice, calculates all the derived values for you, and has validation. There are some problems with running it on Wine. Last year I tried getting it to run for a couple of hours, then gave up and booted Windows on one of the laptops.

This year around, I made an effort and finally got it to run. Here are the commands that made the cut for me (Ubuntu Hardy, Wine 0.9.59):


mkdir /tmp/formfiller
cd /tmp/formfiller
wget -nv http://deklaravimas1.vmi.lt/eFormFiller25v6_2008_03_06.zip
unzip eFormFiller25v6_2008_03_06.zip
wget -nv http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks

export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-eFF/
wineprefixcreate

sh winetricks dcom98
sh winetricks win98
sh winetricks riched20
sh winetricks vcrun6
sh winetricks wsh56

wine setup.exe /q

wine $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program\ Files/ABBYY\ eFormFiller\ 2.5/FormFillerLight.exe


I hope it will be useful to somebody.

Update: naaaah, it works with the last year's income tax form, but doesn't with this year's. Time to boot Windows again :(

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey, it worked, thanks!

Unknown said...

yes, it does :)

Albertas Agejevas said...

I'm so glad this script is still useful.

Anonymous said...

Hi, thanx a lot for instruction. Just one question : when this program is used on Windows, it notifies about wrong filled fields. It didn't occured on wine. Does it mean that I had filled the form corectly (miracle) or the eformfiller doesn't work properly?

Albertas Agejevas said...

Validation works fine as far as I remember. That's what the Windows Scripting Host DLLs are for.

Nowadays I don't bother with Wine and just use Virtualbox.

Anonymous said...

thnx

healthy-lifestyle-tips said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
mollis said...

No headaches:
http://deklaravimas.vmi.lt/lt/Pradinis_Prisijungimo_puslapis/Prisijungimasperisorinessistemas.aspx