Every year, I have to declare my income to the tax services. In the preceding years, I managed it with mostly no problems. This year, my computer being in the amd64 architecture, I feared I would have some troubles and I was right: one hour later, I could not yet do my declaration, and I used only about three minutes under MacOS X.

I started with a small advance: I already had a valid certificate till 2010, recognized at first try. I could then fill my tax form (the certificate is in PKCS 12 format, so I could later use it on the Mac to finish the declaration). The downfall was at the time of the signature: the java applet that was to be used to sign would not work.

• Sun did not publish any amd64 version of its plugin and will not do it before early 2009...
• openjdk-6 is not made for Debian
• The IcedTea plugin does not work for the signing applet.
• Blackdown Java is off the web... and before that, I had an old copy which kept segfaulting on this applet.
• Building a chroot for Iceweasel does not work fast enough (even a xhost + did not work)...

Conclusion: I made it on a Mac, and this bullshit are a nuisance to me.