Dennis Kanbier’s Blog

After doing some research on the internet I found a way to use a Windows-only application called infraEnterprise on my workstation running Linux.

The application uses Internet Explorer 6 and MDAC 2.7, which may be a combination more Windows-only applications use. Here are the steps I took to get infraEnterprise running on my Fedora 9 machine.

We’re going to install the following software

• wine
• cabextract
• ies4linux
• mdac 2.7

First we’re going to install wine and cabextract using yum:
sudo yum install wine cabextract
Once this is finished we’re going to install IE6 using ies4linux:

wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux

This should open up a GUI menu. Make the selections that suit your needs. For infraEnterprise IE6 and ActiveX will do. After you click the OK button the program will install IE6 for you.

Once that is done, you are ready to install MDAC 2.7. This is the trickiest part of this guide, as MDAC is Microsoft software.  You can search Google for it, the file should be called MDAC_TYP.EXE. Once you’ve found and downloaded it, we should place it in a place where wine can find it:
cp MDAC_TYP.EXE ~/.ies4linux/ie6/drive_c/
Once that is done, we need to tell the wine program to open it using Windows 2000 compatibility. You can use the winecfg command for that, after you’ve told it we want to configure ies4linux’s wine configuration (be sure to replace “username” with your username):

export WINEPREFIX="/home/username/.ies4linux/ie6"
winecfg

This should open a GUI on the appropiate tab. Select ”Add Programs”, and browse to the MDAC_TYP.EXE file we copied earlier. Once it’s added, select ”Windows 2000″ as it’s compatibility mode.

Now we’re finally ready to install MDAC. Launch the MDAC_TYP.EXE file using wine in the same terminal where you  did the export command. If you’ve lost that terminal, use the export command again and launch MDAC_TYPE.EXE:

cd ~/.ies4linux/drive_c/
wine MDAC_TYPE.EXE

This should install MDAC 2.7, so it can be used with Internet Explorer. You should how be able to launch Internet Explorer 6 on Linux, with MDAC support! To try it out, lauch it using:
ie6
This should open an Internet Explorer browser. After these steps I was able to browse to the infraEnterprise server, download and install the client software and use the software as if I where running Windows!

One side note though, using a secured URL (https) results in very high CPU usage. I didn’t need a secure connection, but if you do and wondering why it eats so much CPU you now know what causes it.