ies4linux – Installing Internet Explorer on Linux

ies4linux is cool little project which provides a way run Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in Linux through wine. It provides IE 6, 5.5 and 5.01 as well as Adobe Flash and the option to install the Microsoft’s TrueType Corefonts; while the full IE 7 package can’t be supported through wine, the beta does provides support for the IE 7 rendering engine using the IE 6 user interface. There are some issues with the beta as well as a hack (available at the bottom of the ies4linux beta page) provided for proxy configuration for IE 7, but be sure to read about the known issues for all versions. Average user shouldn’t install IE 7, it’s mainly for the benefit of web developers.

So why does anyone want to install Internet Explorer in Linux?

Well there are a few reasons:

1. I can and it’s pretty cool
2. Accessing IE only sites – where User Agent Switcher doesn’t do the trick
3. Web Developers who need to test their sites with IE

So let’s get on with the install; we need to install the two dependencies wine of course and cabextract.

su
urpmi wine cabextract
exit

Then we need to setup wine which will create the .wine directory and all the associated files (registry etc.):

wine config

Once the basic configuration is done the wine configuration GUI is presented and you can configure wine further, the only thing that is required to set is the Audio Driver under the Audio Tab. [The default driver for most will be ALSA]

We’re now ready to install ies4linux.

Download the package:

wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz

Extract the package:

tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz

Change to the working directory:

cd ies4lin*

The newer versions of ies4linux use a qt or gtk GUI, but we’ll keep going in konsole by issuing the --no-gui flag. To view the full list of options use ./ies4linux --full-help . Using the command below ies4linux will install IE 6, 5.5, 5.01, Adobe Flash and the MS TTF Corefonts. The MS corefonts will come in handy for future program installs under wine as it is a necessity for some, so I suggest that they are installed.

./ies4linux --no-gui --install-corefonts --install-ie55 --install-ie5

Once completed you can run Internet Explorer by typing:

ie6 <or> ie55 <or> ie5

or launch IE via the desktop shortcuts.

IE 6

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Tags: Linux, ies4linux, Internet Explorer, Howto, Mandriva