What to do if you NEED Internet Explorer

What do you do if you NEED to use Internet Explorer on your Linux system? Of course, nobody would WANT to use Internet Explorer on Linux but there are times when you need it to get your work done. This is a sad state of affairs, so remember to encourage your software vendors to always support open standards so that we can use the web browser of our choosing.

Fortunately, someone has made it very easy to run IE on Linux. The project is called IEs 4 Linux, which will run IE using Wine. If you read the IE license from Microsoft, you will learn that you should own a copy of Windows if you want to install IE. There is no way for IEs4Linux to know if you have a license, so it simply uses the honor system.

To install IEs4Linux on Ubuntu, you can follow these simple instructions. The script runs a simple text-based wizard, which offers you the choice of installing IE version 5.0, 5.5, or 6.0. If you hit "Enter" four times, it will install IE 6.0 with the Flash Player plugin. There are also several more plugins available that you can install with IEs4Linux.

Here is what the installation wizard looks like:


Once the wizard is completed, you should have an icon on your desktop which will start-up Internet Explorer. Here is a screenshot of me using IE to manage a Cisco MARS appliance, which requires IE. (Shame on them!) You can also see that I managed to successfully install the Google Toolbar for IE, although it is formatted a little awkward.

Comments

  1. Anonymous1/30/2007 10:49 PM

    Thanks for the tip. I, luckily, do not NEED to use IE and I hope I never do. I refuse to use it at all costs, even to test my websites for IE.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous8/31/2007 8:32 AM

    I don't know if you are still upkeeping this tutorial, but if you are, could you tell me how you got the google toolbar installed on ies4linux?

    ReplyDelete
  3. UP11/28/2007 1:20 PM

    You can download Google Tootbar 3 from http://oldapps.com/google_toolbar.htm which will install in ies4linux

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous1/31/2008 5:11 PM

    @ubuntu tutorials: sadly, there's still clueless people out there who still using IE, and we still need to test our developed websites in IE. hopefully firefox user will increased over times.

    ReplyDelete

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