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It has never been easy to run any version of IE under any version of WINE. The best we had it was an old project called "IES4Linux", but that was for IE 6, and didn't work all that well, and is now dead :(

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

Just be a bit patient...
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/news/55

Just migrate to Linux and you have two choices. Number one is to run IE6 in Wine, there is a script with lets you install IE6, IE5 and IE5.5 on linux. The number two is to run Windows XP in VirtualBox (or any other virtual machine software), with the advantage of a secure and update system guarding the outdated and unsupported Windows XP. Since your web app should only need IE6 the switch to Linux should be very easy.

If you're suitably masochistic:

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

ooh, wine on windows + IEs4Linux

My god, Wine has no use whatsoever

here ya go, and good luck with that! :)

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

Multiple versions of IE can be done courtesy of here or here

Also here Stuck on IE6? Upgrade to Linux! :)

IE 6 can run perfectly fine in linux http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page and its also always possible to run XP in a VM to use exchange and IE6 when needed. I worked for a very large Application Service Provider a few years back. The CRM and Time Management systems were only guaranteed to work with IE. In answer to your "How can this work in a company?" The answer is simple. The company says you use IE6. You use IE6. They re paying you to be there. You do what they say and don't claim that you can't do your job without LInux. Millions do it every day and thousands more are looking for jobs, myself included. You claim to be a technical user, prove it. You can do your own thing, but you have to find a way to comply with corporate policy too.

It's also a pain to use. It BSODs on boot in KVM, you have to first boot it in another hypervisor, run mergeide, and then it'll run normally. Plus they expire every few months, so you get to do it all over again. Ultimately easier to just fly to bird to IE users.

If Google is just using IE6 for testing their website/services wouldn't just using IEs4Linux be good enough?

Better yet, they could use/build their own version of Wine to run instances of IE6 on linux. After all they are experts with Wine and Linux.

if your installer is in a Zip file, you open it and run it.

Unless the zipfile is of the program itself, in which case, you make a folder, drag the contents of the zipfile to that folder, and run it. And technically, you probably should be putting that folder somewhere in Program Files, and making it owned by whatever usually owns Program Files, and, you know, all the stuff that an installer normally does for you.

it's still corporate. As is Fedora and Red Hat and Debian.

You may well have a point with Ubuntu, but which corporation runs Debian?

When I mention "driver" to someone and they give me a funny look and say "What's a driver?", do you really think they will have an easy time of using Linux?

I suspect they already do, with Google and tons of websites they use, and possibly with their phone. As for the desktop, absolutely, yes.

Perhaps they will have a difficult time installing Linux, but they would very likely have an easy time of using it.

Put another way: Is that the kind of person who generally installs software on their computer? Is it the kind of person you want installing software on their computer?

you'll spend 20 minutes just trying to get them to open a terminal so you can give them the commands to fix whatever issues they have that cannot be fixed via the GUI.

After which I'll spend ten seconds typing those commands into an IM window, and having them copying and pasting them into that terminal.

And that assumes you're right about those 20 minutes. Most people I know can handle "Click the word Applications in the upper left of the screen. Then click Accessories. Then click Terminal."

But again, there's still that large assumption that such an issue will come up at all. In my experience, issues come up for people on Windows that require such calls much more frequently than on Linux.

What you think someone should or should not be allowed to do is irrelavent and imposing that on others frankly goes against the whole Linux and free software philosophy.

I beg to differ. If that was really the case, Linux would likely be distributed under a BSD license, rather than the GPL.

The question is, will they have a better experience installing software (and thus putting themselves at risk), or not installing software?

To do this, the guy blew away Windows and installed Ubuntu without telling the guy what all he did.

Pretty inexcusable.

particularly the web apps, they are pretty archaic and require IE6. But since the helpful Linux guy trashed the machine to put in his personal preference, instead of just helping the poor guy get set up, one of the guys I work with had to re-install Vista for him.

Vista? Really?

And if that was really the only problem he was having, it's possible to install IE6 on Linux. Not that I am suggesting he should've done this on his own, but then, he also couldn't have reformatted to Vista on his own.

I'd also suggest contacting the maintainers of those web apps and complaining, even if you're going to reformat. This is a guy who shouldn't have to know or care what web browser he's using. It's irresponsible of the apps in question to require a specific web browser.

I mean, to put it another way, what if he'd gotten a Mac?

No, but you can run IE6 and IE7.

... at the same time, which is more than you can do on Windows.

No, but you can run IE6 and IE7.

Couldn't Microsoft release an official standalone version of IE6 or IE8 too (they could download it from the 'net if they don't know how ;0)>

Not only does such a thing exist, but it can be installed on Linux.

Er, wait. It doesn't work on Ubuntu/Jaunty. It hasn't been updated since before Wine 1.0 and it no longer works. Laaaame.

No, Seriously.

I have had a 'test and destroy' PC that I use to try different *nix distros, and usually have WINE and ies4linux installed.
Every bit of crap that hits the news, or I stumble across, I try to run it with WINE or open IE 6 and go to that sight. Other than IE 6 and/or WINE crashing, I've not been able to detect any malware actually making an install. Usually nothing even makes it to the c:/windows/temp folder in .wine, or even appears to happen. Been trying this for about two years now, and no success to date.

I won't say that it can't happen, just that with every GNU/Linux distro** I've tried: no go. YMMV

**Fedora, Red Hat, CENT OS, Mandrake, Mandriva, Suse, Mint, Ubuntu, Kubuntu...those are the ones I remember.

Laugh if you want, bur IE does qualify as professional software that does not run under wine.

Ok, I'll laugh.

Yes, you can run IE6 perhaps, but not IE7 or 8.

Actually, you can.

The rest of your comment is kind of rambling and kind of irrelevant. My windows is pretty solid, though not because of antivirus. But you'd have to pay me a lot to force me to use it as a primary OS.

I'm giving up mod points to point this out, but you can install IE on Linux.

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

Thank you Captain Obvious, did you happen to notice that Pricewatch has Windows XP Pro listed for $88? If you didn't, then you obviously did not click the link.

I was going to write use Windows XP Pro, but felt that the person who asked already knew that XP Home is not allowed under a virtual machine. Besides even if he did run XP Home under a virtual machine who is going to know?

Yes for good sakes he could just run Linux, but how about IE? He needs to run XP Pro under XEN or some other open source virtual machine.

What you forgot to mention, and so did I, was that Internet Explorer can be made to run under WINE under Linux. An easy way to do it is to use the IEs4Linux install scripts. Under the same Office 2003 or whatever the college offers as well.

But please note that the posted said he uses Windows, but does not want to allow pop-ups and opening up his firewall under Windows, and wanted a virtual machine solution under Windows not Linux, but thank you for your option to use Linux instead. It lead to this post, which has more useful information in it.

P.S. pay no attention to Anonymous Cowards, most of the AC posts are trolls.

Um, anyone know where the Linux version of IE7 is?

It is here: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

Agree with your point, but assuming you are using Linux, the IEs4Linux package is excellent for testing IE5-7. The only thing I've had to use a Windows machine for was a javascript window opener that didn't work under Linux, but did under Windows - otherwise rendering, CSS, and javascript seem to be faithfully reproduced.

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

Upgrading to IE7 is just going to make them do the same again when IE8 comes around, and it's still going to force me to boot Windows just to test in IE.

I use wine for IE testing in Linux. A quick install script can be found here.

IE for Linux and MS Office for Linux. You're welcome.

Oddly enough, it took the FOSS comunity to get IE on Linux.

Why you'd use it, though, I don't know.

Photoshop CS3

Looking at the AppDB page, I'd suggest trying it on some distro other than Ubuntu. Although CS2 works better if that would be sufficient.

- Office 2007

I need those specific apps because those are the formats my peers and clients use.

Well, you can open .docx files as of OOo 3.0. Or maybe you could talk them into using Sun's ODF Plugin (It's a long shot, but I thought I'd throw that out there.)

- MSIE 6/7

IE6 runs, sure, but leaks memory like there's no tomorrow, so I have to kill -9 it after a few minutes lest I face a swap-spiral of doom.

IEsforLinux? Although it seems a little dead...

I can't speak about PS CS3, and I couldn't give a damn about Office, but I know first hand that you can get IE6 and earlier versions of Photoshop running with relatively little difficulty.

For IE6, try this script. Worked for me, and I donated. Obrigado, Senhor Lopes! Just start IE6 as ~bin/ie6

Photoshop (I've tried 3, 5, 7) runs out of the box.

Other things that have worked well for me are Microship MPLAB, Altera FPGA toolset, Paint Shop Pro (various versions), the Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition toolchain (including 64 bit, and even Itanium cross compiler - all work perfectly) and various other things including Crayon Physics!

That said, I have a rule of thumb with WINE - if you can't get something running after 2 hours of futzing, it's time to give up. ;-)

If it runs, it runs; if not, life's too short for Windows-only software. We should be pressuring our vendors to support a real operating system.

Have a gander into IEs4Linux
All that needs to be done is have (the maintainers of) IETab become aware of it...

Yes there is. It's a wine regedit. Search for 'user agent' on this page.
This guy (Dustin) claims he *has* got premium access working this way.

Also note the comment below by slopes that indicates the default will be changed.

Linux + Wine + ies4Linux + OWA.

This worked a treat for me:

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

I used it to play along with a school website which absolutely refused to work on anything but IE.

Note, it's a very detailed install script, and not entirely trivial to get it to play well with another wine install. But for almost one-click install of a near-perfect IE6 (or 5.5, or 5) under linux, it is awesome.

It doesn't solve your Adobe dependencies, but just thought I'd spread the word.

You want MS to provide a linux version so that you can either state your intent to never install it, or so that you can sh*t on it? I'm sure they'll get right on that...

No need to wait for MS to do that. I'm sure this will be in ies4linux eventually, thanks to Sérgio. Want it sooner? Donate time or money to either ies4linux or to Wine. Or both.

I can't upgrade IE.

FWIW You can run IE6 and IE7 on the same machine fairly easily.

• Using a separate binary in Windows
• IEs4Linux using Wine in Linux
• Using VPC or Vmware

I've been using IE 6 & 7 under wine, works great!
download here

VirtualPC does not support Windows Vista Home Premium, which is a dealbreaker. And totally stupid to boot - the differences between the various Vista versions are not so great that VirtualPC should break. It is just more of the same old Microsoft extortion scheme.

I use IEs4Linux for testing instead. This package does work well enough, at least for testing purposes, although some sites tend to peg the CPU at 100%.

I, for one, cannot wait for the day when IE 6 finally bites the dust.

It might be if IEtab works with IEs4Linux, though i haven't used that, so i'm unsure.

You could try this for Linux: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

I've never heard of it, either. Maybe he was thinking of IE for Unix, or IEs4Linux.

Just use IE for Linux like anybody else, ok?

It may seem a joke, but IE does in fact work under Linux thanks to Wine.

But if one does not own a copy of Windows, where did he get a copy of Internet Explorer?

Actually, IE runs fairly well on linux (well 5.5 and 6, I don't know about IE7) via wine using ies4linux. The nice thing is that you can have multiple IE versions installed, which is useful for testing.

Still, I'll expect to see icicles in hades before MS releases an official 'nix IE client :-)

1. Install your favourite flavour of GNU/Linux
2. Install wine, cabextract
3. Do: wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
   tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
   cd ies4linux-*
   ./ies4linux
4. Proceed to test your site in IE6, IE5.5 and/or IE5
5. ...
6. Profit!

Voila. Side-by-side installation of multiple Internet Explorer versions, for free.

Why didn't you just run IE directly?

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

From the ies4linux website: "Please, don't use any of these IEs to navigate!! Get Firefox."

You need to have a windows license to use that. The IE eula requires it. See here: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Legal_notices

I agree on lots of stuff not working properly, but for many apps relatively simple workarounds exist.
For your mentioned IE problems, there's IEs4Linux. Versions 5-6 run more or less flawlessy, 7 mostly works and 1/2 sometimes do (for laughs).
FlashFXP (which I frequently use because of the lack of any decently stable native FTP client(!)) runs almost perfectly after applying a small source patch and recompiling.
Steam with all it's HL2-based apps worked out-of-the-box, IIRC. (Bought HL2 back after buying and before trying to install Windows on my shiny new metal box. Unfortunately XP got a wee bit confused by too much storage and refused to install, so I switched to Gentoo and, more recently, Ubuntu).

Many other apps will work if you put a similar amount of work into them. For anything else, I've got a legacy XP ThinkPad with Office, Civ III and that kind of stuff installed. Ironically it's the only computer having trouble accessing some SMB shares on this network.