Status-Q

To follow on from my last post, it occurred to me that I could probably run IE on my Linux machine using WINE, which would save me having to run the whole of Windows. A friend had mentioned doing this, but I presumed it would be quite complicated. My Windows VM is currently “installing Security Update 64 of 97”, so I thought I’d look around while I was waiting.

It turns out to be very easy now to get IE5, 5.5 and 6 going, thanks to a script called IEs4Linux.

On Ubuntu, you need a couple of packages from the Universe repository first:

sudo aptitude install cabextract wine


(More detailed info here)

Then you can just follow the instructions on the IEs4Linux page.

This post was made with IE6 running on my Linux machine. Good. It works. Now I can go back to Firefox.

Regular readers will know that I’m a Mac user, but I do have a copy of Windows on my machine as well, which I can run using Parallels. Generally, the only time I fire it up is to check that web sites I’ve created using standards-compliant browsers also work under Internet Explorer. Generally, they don’t, and I have to start inserting nasty hacks to get around the bugs in IE. Anyone who does web design will know this process only too well.

It struck me tonight just how ironic it is that the only reason I ever need to run Windows is because it’s broken!