Making RenWeb Work with Ubuntu and Mint

RenWeb is a popular school information management system commonly used in private schools in the United States. Although it is not the only one out there, it is one I have personally used. My day job is teaching music and acting as resident technical support at a private school in central Ohio. What may or may not be well-known to many is that the company is quite Windows-centric. Macs and Linux machines have been in many ways left out in the cold, that is, until recently.

RenWeb as a company is in the middle of a transition from an old website to a new one. The old one is ugly and clunky; usability is not a high priority at RenWeb if its old website is any mark. Technical limitations abound, as well. Internet Explorer and Firefox are the only officially supported browsers, but IE 10 and 11 require compatibility mode to work and Firefox sometimes hangs up. The old website is complemented by an ugly desktop application written in Visual Basic, RenWeb Desktop. It is only available for Windows PCs. The new website, called the RenWeb portal, is intended to replace both the old one and RenWeb Desktop, but it has not yet reached feature parity, so both versions are currently available. It boasts a better look, cleaner layout, improved usability, and it supports both Windows and Mac versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. How did they do it? Microsoft's Silverlight technology.

Silverlight is the platform upon which Netflix delivers its content to millions of homes and is also the basis for the new RenWeb. Despite the apparent effort to ignore the hordes of Linux users, some developers in the community have worked around the limitations with some technical wizardry. Enter the PipeLight project. Pipelight provides browser plugins for Silverlight, the Windows version of Flash, Wildvine, and more. 

Linux users can do everything with RenWeb. It's all completely unsupported, but it works. Firefox already handles the old website. RenWeb Desktop runs pretty well with WINE right out of the box. The Silverlight plugin just so happens to work very nicely with RenWeb's portal, but as of this writing, there seems to be some underlying problem with Chrome (version 32.0.1700.107).

To take advantage of this great piece of software, you'll need to add a repository to your system. Open up a terminal and execute these three commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pipelight

If you are not familiar with the sudo command, it runs these commands with administrator privileges. The first subscribes your machine to the Pipelight software repository. The second updates the local copy of the available software, and the third installs Pipelight. Unless you had it installed at one time, that is all that is required! Once installed, all three versions of RenWeb work! Yay!