Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 9, Administration and Automation

#80 Protect Yourself from Windows Applications

HACK

You should see the same dialog if you try to open a Microsoft Word attach-

ment using Mozilla Mail. Then you can set up Mozilla Mail to run /usr/local/

bin/wordview automatically when opening attached Word documents.

The technique for setting up the Mozilla Thunderbird email client is a bit

different. When you receive a Word document, right-click it and choose

Open. This brings up a dialog that gives you the choice of saving the file or

specifying a program with which to open the file. In addition, a checkbox

(similar to the one in Figure 9-2 for Mozilla) tells Thunderbird to treat this

type of file the same way by default.

Unfortunately, it isn’t quite as easy to make the Mozilla Firefox browser

behave this way. I expect this limitation will disappear as the application

matures. Fortunately, it looks like Firefox inherits the setting from Thunder-

bird. After setting up Thunderbird to view Word documents with

wordview,

that setting seems to have magically appeared in the preferences dialog for

Firefox.

Preparing for Unlikely Damage

With everything protected in a sudo jail, the worst possible damage a virus

could do is to infect your copy of CrossOver Office. Even though I am not

aware of any virus that can attack CrossOver or Wine, it is theoretically pos-

sible, because both mimic Windows very closely. ...