hack to make'em think my Kubuntu PC is Windows?

[Tom_ZeCat]

I'm attending a Webinar on Tuesday. I was annoyed when the system requirements of the thing were Windows or Mac. After I registered, I got the message to the effect of, "We detect you're using an unsupported PC. Please use a supported one on Tuesday." Annoying. However, I suspect the webinar would work on my Kubuntu laptop. They should just be streaming a video, which this can do. However, If they can detect my OS, they might block me and insist on my using Windows.

Is there a way to fool their detection systems into thinking this Kubuntu laptop is a Windows one?

I can always keep my Windows 7 netbook standing by in case this doesn't work and attend the webinar that way. I would love to hack my way to doing this with Linux and then send them an e-mail afterwards telling them they should support Linux because the webinar worked anyway. If it doesn't work, I've got the Windows netbook.

Btw, the browsers I have installed are FireFox, Chrome, and Rekonq. Well, I do have Internet Explorer for WINE. I guess that would be one way to fool them, but yuck.

[SteveRiley]

They're probably looking at the user agent string coming from your browser. It contains information about your operating system. For instance, here's my user agent from Konqueror:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.21 (KHTML, like Gecko) konqueror/4.13.97 Safari/537.21

and here's my user agent from Firefox:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0

You can check your own at http://www.whatsmyuseragent.com/

Both Firefox and Chrom(e)ium have add-ons that you can install for changing the user agent. These add-ons will have pre-configured agent strings for various Windows browsers, and you can set distinct agents on a per-site basis. I'd recommend installing one of those and configuring a fake agent for the webinar site.

[Tom_ZeCat]

They're probably looking at the user agent string coming from your browser. It contains information about your operating system. For instance, here's my user agent from Konqueror:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.21 (KHTML, like Gecko) konqueror/4.13.97 Safari/537.21

and here's my user agent from Firefox:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0

You can check your own at http://www.whatsmyuseragent.com/

Both Firefox and Chrom(e)ium have add-ons that you can install for changing the user agent. These add-ons will have pre-configured agent strings for various Windows browsers, and you can set distinct agents on a per-site basis. I'd recommend installing one of those and configuring a fake agent for the webinar site.

Cool, thanks. I'll try that. Can you think of any reason why they would not support Linux with their webinar? The only one I can think of is, "We just don't want to **** with it." You would think they would support it for something that's just browser based. The Linux FireFox does everything the Windows one does.

Anyway, I'll try this, but keep my Windows netbook standing by just in case.

[SteveRiley]

Depends on their webinar software. If it's Flash or pure HTML5, then they're just being lazy. If they're using Citrix GoToMeeting or Cisco WebEx, you might be able to get these to work. You'll likely need to install the Oracle Java rather than OpenJDK and some other 32-bit libs -- Google around for instructions. But you won't get any technical support for this -- that's what they mean by "not supported."

[ronw]

If it is a webinar via gotomeeting.com (Citrix), you are likely wasting your time.

I didn't have any problems being a participant in a WebEx meeting recently with OpenJDK installed, but all I did was watch screensharing by the host. You might need Oracle's version for certain features.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Regardless of what ends up happening, I HOPE you're planning on complaining about their "you can't use Linux" philosophy. This is something I feel very strongly about. Remember back when micro$oft was trying to take over the Internet, and sites that were IE-only were rampant? Have you noticed that those went away? It's because people [like me!] complained about their windows-centric nonsense. I literally cannot recall the last time I came upon a site that required Internet Exploiter. And I'm glad.

[SteveRiley]

There's a difference between "can't use" and "won't support." When an organization claims "won't support," they mean that they won't help you try to get something to work. You're perfectly free to attempt any number of hacks, workarounds, and spoofs you want.

[Tom_ZeCat]

Regardless of what ends up happening, I HOPE you're planning on complaining about their "you can't use Linux" philosophy. This is something I feel very strongly about. Remember back when micro$oft was trying to take over the Internet, and sites that were IE-only were rampant? Have you noticed that those went away? It's because people [like me!] complained about their windows-centric nonsense. I literally cannot recall the last time I came upon a site that required Internet Exploiter. And I'm glad.

Yes, I remember the obnoxious free banners that Microsoft offered that said, "Best experienced with Internet Explorer version [whatever]". I was one of the people complaining even though I wasn't a Linux user back then. Even though I used Windows, my browser of choice was Opera. They will definitely be hearing from me. Whether it's a situation where it won't work at all or it might work via hacks and is not supported, they're hearing back from me that it should both worth and be as fully supported as Windows and Mac.

I would have more leverage if it were a paid webinar, not a free one, but I have no doubt they'll offer a paid and more extensive one at some point. At that point I can always say, "I only pay if Linux is supported."

[Tom_ZeCat]

I wrote to them. Here's what I said:

Dear Sir or Madam:
I'm looking forward to attending the free Writer's Digest webinar this Tuesday about copywriting careers. I very much appreciate your offering a free and valuable service like this.

My only disappointment was your system requirements. You support Windows and Mac computers, iPhones and Android phones, and even iPads and Android tablets. However, you fail to support Linux-based PCs, despite their being millions of them in use in the world. As a writer, I prefer using a Kubuntu Linux-based laptop because its security is far superior to that of Windows, and it is far more affordable than a Macintosh. In fact, it's security also beats that of Macintosh.

Linux-based browsers like FireFox and Chrome support all the major plug-ins such as Flash and Javascript. There is also no shortage of quality writing tools available for Linux, including LibreOffice, SoftMaker Office, GoldenDict, and many others. A Linux-based PC is a great choice for writers, and many of us use them. I hope you will consider supporting Linux in all your webinars.

Thank you for hearing me out.

Sincerely,
Tom Owen Meinen

[Silent Observer]

Good on you, Tom. I'm a Linux-only sometime writer, too, and like some of your other respondents I used non-IE browsers for all the years I was on Windows as well (started with Netscape before IE was "part of Windows"); I always saw "optimizing" for IE as going out of the way to do it wrong (vs. standards-compliant web design).

Hopefully they'll get other complaints from Linux users, but I can see why they aren't interested in supporting Linux -- there are literally more than a hundred flavors of current Linux, not even counting legacy versions of various ages (for instance, Kubuntu versions two years old are still fully supported by Kubuntu, and Debian in general has LTS for versions going back to 2010). "Supporting" Linux-in-general is a nightmare even compared to supporting Windows XP/Vista/7/8, Mac OSX.*, iOS and Android together; developers and hosts pretty well have to draw the line short of OS-level support (though they could allow Linux browsers without excessive extra effort). A more reasonable goal for web designers and hosts might be to support the "core" distributions, like Debian, Fedora, etc.; that will make most of their derivatives (*ubuntu, Mepis, antiX, etc. in the case of Debian) work without much if any tweaking, and cut the support task down to manageable size.

[Tom_ZeCat]

Good on you, Tom. I'm a Linux-only sometime writer, too, and like some of your other respondents I used non-IE browsers for all the years I was on Windows as well (started with Netscape before IE was "part of Windows"); I always saw "optimizing" for IE as going out of the way to do it wrong (vs. standards-compliant web design).

Hopefully they'll get other complaints from Linux users, but I can see why they aren't interested in supporting Linux -- there are literally more than a hundred flavors of current Linux, not even counting legacy versions of various ages (for instance, Kubuntu versions two years old are still fully supported by Kubuntu, and Debian in general has LTS for versions going back to 2010). "Supporting" Linux-in-general is a nightmare even compared to supporting Windows XP/Vista/7/8, Mac OSX.*, iOS and Android together; developers and hosts pretty well have to draw the line short of OS-level support (though they could allow Linux browsers without excessive extra effort). A more reasonable goal for web designers and hosts might be to support the "core" distributions, like Debian, Fedora, etc.; that will make most of their derivatives (*ubuntu, Mepis, antiX, etc. in the case of Debian) work without much if any tweaking, and cut the support task down to manageable size.

Yes, even if they supported Debian/*ubuntu that would cover a large number of Linux users.

I also wish some software developers would support Debian/*ubuntu more. I use a story crafting program named Dramatica. There's nothing for Linux even remotely like it. It doesn't run well enough under WINE. There are some critical features that just don't work. I have to run it under VirtualBox/Win 7. I would pay for a Linux version if they would bring one out.

SoftMaker Office has a Linux version. I use their Writer app sometimes instead of LO Writer. I use it when writing in German because it has some features that LO Writer lacks. If you spell a word incorrectly according to revised German spelling, but correctly according to old spelling, it gets squiggly underlined in blue instead of red. Plus it has the Langenscheits and Duden dictionaries built-in. But what I love most is it has the WordStar cursor diamond commands built in that you can optionally turn on if you want. With every word processor I've used since WordStar, I've dug into its macro system to turn on as many of the WordStar cursor diamond commands as I can because they're invaluable. I feel I have one hand tied behind my back without them. SM Office is pretty cool, though it's not open source and it doesn't have a nice macro system like LibreOffice does.

Anyway, sorry to ramble. The point is some software makers do support Linux. SoftMaker had a Debian install package for me. They had some other packages available. I forget which.

[Tom_ZeCat]

After the webinar:
The webinar was really important to me, so I could not take the chance on it not running. I therefore simply booted to Windows 7 and did it. The webinar had me download and install a Windows executable file and then ran that. It's probably good I didn't try to do it in Linux because I'd doubt it would have run under WINE. It may have, but I'd doubt it.

To make their webinars support all platforms, it seems like it would make more sense to use java-based software. Yes, I bash java sometimes because it has its strange quirks. Java-based programs use non-standard interfaces for whatever OS their running under. In Windows they don't look like Windows apps; in Mac, they don't look like Mac, in Ubuntu they don't look like Ubuntu, etc. Plus, java is way slower than languages like C++. However, Java's big saving grace is its cross platform compatibility. Write it in Java and it will run on almost anything. If they used Java, there would be no need to support multiple Linux distros. They could just embed a Java applet into a web page and every accesses the webinar software via a browser. The disadvantage is a slower initial startup time, but once it's started, it should run fine.

Right now I'm busy learning C++, but it makes me tempted to also learn Java. I have some Java-based apps on this laptop. Every time I use them, I feel some annoyance at their slow startup times and weird interfaces, but ultimately they run and do the jobs I want them to do.

[SteveRiley]

HTML 5 is the way to go for all of this. Proprietary plugins, or Flash, or Java are all substandard. Furthermore, Java is such a security risk on PCs that I can no longer recommend it -- ever.

[jlittle]

... The webinar had me download and install a Windows executable file and then ran that...

Isn't that a huge security risk being imposed on the participants in the webinar?

More than one site I have worked at would have had conniptions if I attempted such a thing. The forms to be filled in, the budget approval required to even assess the executable...

[Tom_ZeCat]

HTML 5 is the way to go for all of this. Proprietary plugins, or Flash, or Java are all substandard. Furthermore, Java is such a security risk on PCs that I can no longer recommend it -- ever.

Does HTML 5 have a built-in video capability? I haven't set up web pages since the early 2000s and I remember HTML didn't do much, so you had to add stuff like Flash, javascript, or java to get higher-end functionality.

Isn't that a huge security risk being imposed on the participants in the webinar?

More than one site I have worked at would have had conniptions if I attempted such a thing. The forms to be filled in, the budget approval required to even assess the executable...

It is a security risk indeed, which is a reason I'm not happy with their choice of technology for this webinar. Of course, it wasn't a risk for me because I didn't use my regular computer. I used a Windows 7 Starter netbook, so there was no chance they could get any of my files. Even if I had used my regular laptop, it would have been booted to Windows 7, which would have had no access to my encrypted Kubuntu Ext4 drive.