Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
As much as Linux users might desire to live in a world without Windows plans can be thwarted by a necessary piece of Windows-only software. This year the Australian Tax Office e-tax tax return system is no longer one of these.
e-tax has long been a frustration to Linux-only systems.
Two years ago I referred to it as potentially one of Australia’s biggest applications with a “user base” of every single working Australian, in my “gentle guide” to migrating to Linux from Windows and lamented its Windows-only flavour.
While it may be tempting for some to claim Linux does not have sufficient market share to justify developing a port it should be noted there is no MacOS version either.
The Australian Tax Office (ATO) states e-tax has been successfully tested on a MacOS computer running Windows under Virtual PC (and undoubtedly virtualisation also works for Linux computers) but this isn’t the same as running the software natively and, in fact, requires the computer owner to purchase a licensed version of Windows specifically for the once-yearly task of filing a tax return.
Pleasantly, Linux owners have discovered that e-tax now works successfully with the latest version of WINE, the popular tool that seeks to allow Windows programs run within Linux without needing to actually install Windows itself.
Use your Linux distribution’s package manager to ensure WINE is installed and that it has updated to the latest release.
Download the e-tax files and install using wine msiexec /i etax2009_1.msi
If you opt not to install a desktop icon you can fire up e-tax using wine c:/etax2009/etax2009.exe
Interestingly, the ATO has had a dalliance with Linux in the past, with a semi-functional version of the business Electronic Commerce Interface (ECI) being made available in 2005 (as reported by iTWire's own Sam Varghese.)
Yet, try to find it now and the ATO claim it was only a limited pilot and is no longer available until “an evaluation” determines if the ATO ought to proceed. Either the evaluation is really thorough or the ATO have just abandoned it.
I’m guessing the latter, but at least all Linux users wishing to file their personal tax return no longer need to pay the Windows tax to do so.
David Bass
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