TaxAct

What works

I successfully prepared and E-filed 2006 federal and state (Virginia) taxes with TaxACT 2006 in wine. The 2007 version seems to be equally functional so far. It installed, applied updates from the vendor, applied the deluxe version activation code. Printouts are beautiful. Help files work fine.

Printing directly to the printer from Windows now works. The deluxe program also conveniently prints to PDF, and the PDF files contain the proper fonts all encapsulated. You may then print the PDF from a linux program, like Adobe Acrobat or Gnome Document Viewer. The print to PDF feature is disabled for the standard (crippled) version.

What does not

TaxACT uses a custom checkbox widget that displays an X in a box (e.g. option to contribute $3 to election fund). The X is not visible under wine. Highlighting of the checkboxes is visible, however, so that it is possible to mentally maintain the checkbox state, and confirm it with print preview.

For 2007, most labels in the on screen form are wrapped just before the last word. For instance, the label "Your social security number" will show "number" on a second line. This causes the last word to overlay the data field, making the data hard to read in many cases.

Printed forms use ellipses, which seemed to be placed slightly off in 2006, but they look perfect so far this year (or maybe it is the more recent wine version). On 1040EZ, some other variable text is not placed properly. This is very minor and does not affect legibility or ability to mail in the forms.

Some menu options are supposed to take you to an URL in a web browser. These do not work. The URLs in question are for online documentation, and are easily found starting with their home page, so this is not a big deal. I have firefox-2.0.0.11 installed under linux as my web browser, accessible via htmlview.

While running the program, syslog keeps reporting this error:

Mar 13 23:44:00 fairfax kernel: 4gb seg fixup, process TaxAct07.exe (pid 9048), cs:ip 73:6007f2bc
Mar 13 23:44:05 fairfax kernel: printk: 438456 messages suppressed.

However, it still seems to work. 

UPDATE: my first attempt to E-File failed for 2007.  It hangs printing the seg fixup error over and over again in syslog.  Maybe a wine update...  rats....

Workarounds

What was not tested

I did not test all forms and schedules. TaxACT is engine based, so this should not matter. I tested all the types of widgets used in the forms.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Check boxes still broken in 0.9.52. Text wrapping problems - perhaps could be fixed by installing some font.