BenV's notes

Windows and Ninite

So after the Adobe Cancer experience yesterday I still had to install a bunch of other things for the helpless windows user.
After I was done with most of that (of course, the good stuff always comes too late) I ran into this tool: Ninite.
They call it “The easiest way to get apps”. Well, from the screenshots it certainly looks that way. No cruft like toolbars and updaters and junk installed, just the application.

On their page you simply select the application you want installed, including the obvious things as Firefox, OpenOffice, Cancerbat^WAdobe Reader, and even Avast antivirus. The only thing really missing from their list is Total Commander (yes, I stuffed it in their suggestions box ;)), which is pretty much the only application I really miss on linux.
After selecting all the rubbish the user might need you downloader their installer. When you run the installer it downloads and installs all the selected applications.
Easy huh?

The installer looks like this:

And indeed, IT JUST WORKS. Excellent.

Ninite and Wine

Now for the fun part. Let’s see how it works under wine 😉
Knowing Putty should work under wine, I selected that and winscp on the website.

However, trying to run the installer fails after it shows the progressbar bouncing a few times with a useless error:

The wine console gives a bunch of SSL errors, probably related:

trace:wininet:HTTP_HttpSendRequestW Request header -> L"GET /getinstaller?key=00b6ea6210077170ba6d7e0f70317368fda80ae0&version=0%2C1%2C0%2C267&compressed=1&id=9218220A781C9E27B4B4D7CB3CC8AFCB4C7FA19E HTTP/1.1\r\nAccept: */*\r\nHost: ninite.com\r\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Win32)\r\n\r\n"
trace:wininet:HTTP_OpenConnection -->
trace:wininet:GetAddress L"ninite.com"
trace:wininet:HTTP_ResolveName resolved L"ninite.com" to 69.164.199.133
err:wininet:NETCON_secure_connect SSL_connect failed: 12157
warn:wininet:HTTP_OpenConnection Couldn't connect securely to host

That was with wine version 1.1.40. I even tried installing wininet.dll through winetricks, but then it fails with a slightly different error about an invalid server response.
Oh well, too bad for that (it was just for fun anyway), but it’s a great tool for windows 🙂
Keep up the good work Ninite guys!