Container setup for eTax.zug (Linux)

This is a Containerfile for eTax.zug.

If you have an existing directory from last year, you should rename it to avoid conflicts (i.e. mv etax etax_2022). You will probably need to select /home/taxpayer/etax_zug as the installation directory. Otherwise the entrypoint script might behave strange. For now there is a symlink from the current etax default directory to it but they could change it with the next release. Maybe we could establish a more robust logic here though.

Also you should save your tax data in /home/taxpayer/Steuerfaelle. Otherwise the data won't be persisted after you threw the container away!

Using the Containerfile

You can build the image by calling

$ docker build --build-arg HOST_GID=$(id -g) --build-arg HOST_UID=$(id -u) -t etax_zug -f Containerfile .
Sending build context to Docker daemon  93.18kB
…
Successfully tagged etax_zug:latest

You can also use Podman instead of Docker:

$ podman build --build-arg HOST_GID=$(id -g) --build-arg HOST_UID=$(id -u) -t etax_zug -f Containerfile .

After a successful build you should be able to run eTax Zug by calling

$ bash run.sh
No installation was found. Downloading https://etaxdownload.zg.ch/2042/eTaxZGnP2042_64bit.sh to eTaxInstaller.sh.
…

Bugs

Links

Because the image should be small and therefore doesn't contain a browser you can't click on links. Right click + copy would be nice but it seems that the folks at Information Factory AG didn't implement this yet.

Wayland

You need to run the container with --env=DISPLAY and --env=QT_X11_NO_MITSHM=1 to make it work with Wayland.

$ xhost +SI:localuser:$(id -un)

$ podman run --rm -it --env=DISPLAY --env=QT_X11_NO_MITSHM=1 -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -v /home/taxpayer/etax_zug:/home/taxpayer/etax_zug etax_zug

HiDPI-Displays

This is a Java application. Meaning it might not work well with all of your native UI settings. If you are using a display with high DPI and the fonts are very small, you might want to edit the file etax/eTax.zug 2023 nP after the first start.

uiScale

Setting uiScale doesn't seem to work any more:

So for instance from

$INSTALL4J_JAVA_PREFIX exec "$app_java_home/bin/java" "-splash:$app_home/.install4j/s_1wbh84j.png" …

to

$INSTALL4J_JAVA_PREFIX exec "$app_java_home/bin/java" "-Dswing.defaultlaf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel" "-Dsun.java2d.dpiaware=true" "-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on" "-Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2" "-splash:$app_home/.install4j/s_1wbh84j.png" …

-Dsun.java2d.ddscale

This doesn't seem to work either

$INSTALL4J_JAVA_PREFIX exec "$app_java_home/bin/java" "-Dsun.java2d.ddscale=true" "-splash:$app_home/.install4j/s_1wbh84j.png" …

environment variable GDK_SCALE

This doesn't seem to work either

GDK_SCALE=2 $INSTALL4J_JAVA_PREFIX exec "$app_java_home/bin/java" "-splash:$app_home/.install4j/s_1wbh84j.png" …