Get Apple’s new Safari 4 beta on Linux now .. here’s how.
Update: Note Safari 4 over WINE on Linux is working properly now.

Safari 4 for Linux?

Of course Apple haven’t really done the noble thing (yet) of releasing a Linux version despite the origins of webkit being firmly Linux based. But of course there are always ways .. here’s 2.

Once you’ve got it installed, you could do worse than heading over to Mac Rumours to test out some of Safari 4 beta’s whizz-bang moves.

Download the Safari 4 beta

Getting Safari4 for linux

You can download the beta from Apple’s website. Despite appearances you don’t need to enter your email address to download, indeed you may be able to download Safari 4 on linux from this link (though it looks to have session info in it and maybe a UK mirror, YMMV).

Install on your Linux distro

1) Using virtualbox or another virtualisation solution

2) Using Wine [not currently working It works!]

3) Other options …?

Safari 4 for Windows XP Ubuntu

Loading up Virtualbox with a Windows XP guest on my Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) host box – installing Safari 4 works perfectly. Virtualbox is available in the normal repos and for direct download from the virtualbox website for Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, RHEL, etc..

installing Safari 4 on Kubuntu in virtualbox

Once you have Virtualbox installed you’ll also want to install the Guest Additions software, with this you can make applications run seamlessly so that you can run Safari 4 as part of your linux desktop with no visual indications that you’re running it through a virtualisation environment.

running Safari 4 seamlessly on Ubuntu

If you want to use the much hyped “inspect element” feature which has already been hailed as a Firefox killer by some then you’ll need to click the top right “cog” icon and tick in the advanced tab of the preferences to enable the “developer toolbar”. This enables the “inspect element” in the right-click menu. It does look awesome, but I’ve not had chance to fully test it.

Safari 4 run under WINE

Update: Note Safari 4 beta over WINE on Linux is working properly now.

Once you have WINE installed (eg from your distros repos) all you need to do is download the Safari 4 beta exe file (SafariSetup.exe) and double click it. WINE does the rest of the heavy lifting, follow the install prompts and away you go … Or at least that’s how it should be.

Currently all reports at WINE HQ show Safari4 to run like garbage. Nice.

There are some tricks to try from Safari 3, like ensuring you’re running WINE as Windows XP (via winecfg) and making sure truetype fonts are installed in WINE (copy them over).

Wine errors:

$ wine "c:\Program Files\Safari4\Safari.exe"
Connection failure: Connection refused
ALSA lib pulse.c:272:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused
ALSA lib pulse.c:272:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused
fixme:heap:HeapSetInformation (nil) 1 (nil) 0
fixme:advapi:GetCurrentHwProfileA (0x32fcdc) semi-stub
fixme:win:WIN_CreateWindowEx Parent is HWND_MESSAGE
fixme:dwmapi:DwmIsCompositionEnabled 0x32fe30
fixme:system:SystemParametersInfoW Unimplemented action: 8204 (SPI_GETFONTSMOOTHINGCONTRAST)

Other ways to run Safari 4

Let me know what other ways there are to run Safari 4 on Linux (virtualised OSX doesn’t count!) …

First Impressions

I’ll post later about actually using Safari 4, but here’s one of the many thousands of early posts with first impressions of Safari 4 beta.

Update: Note my first impressions of Saf4 beta over WINE on Linux are now up.