ZoneO-tips for Mandriva Linux

I use Mandriva to develop my websites and it's real a pain to have to reboot into windows to test them in internet explorer... Is there a way to test them directly from within Mandriva?

 
 

Eternal problem indeed... On my own sites, I have about 60% visitors that use Internet Explorer, so I can't ignore those nasty IE bugs when I design my pages... Well, I was glad to find out that there IS a simple way to run Internet Explorer on Mandriva... Not only that, you can have IE 5, IE 6, and IE 7 all running at the same time, perfect for testing!

This tutorial will require three pieces of software:

• wine: the windows emulator for linux,
• cabextract: a software for extracting Microsoft cabinet files, also called .CAB files, on UNIX or UNIX-like systems,
• IEs4Linux: an easy script to get IE running on linux.

Wine and cabextract are available in Mandriva, so open up a terminal, log-in as root, install them and logout:

su
urpmi wine cabextract
exit

If you have any trouble, want to use a graphical interface, or do not understand this line, see my previous tutorial, install new software with Mandriva.

The next step is to download IEs4Linux, the stable version will get you IE 5 and IE 6, but if you want to get IE 7, you'll have to use the latest beta version, available here: IEs4Linux 2.5 beta 4. Once you downloaded it, go into your tmp directory, unpack the archive and simply run it:

• open a terminal, as a user (do not log-in as root),
• enter the temporary directory

  cd ~/tmp/

• Unpack the archive

  tar xvfzp ~/Documents/ies4linux-2.5beta4.tar.gz

  (replace Documents/ with the location where you saved the archive)
• move into the ies4linux folder:

  cd ies4linux-2.5beta4

• for installing IE 5.0, IE 5.5, or IE 6.0

  ./ies4linux

• for installing IE 7.0 as well

  ./ies4linux --beta-install-ie7

• Optional cleanup step (once you're sure it worked), remove the temporary install folder

  \rm -rf ~/tmp/ies4linux-2.5beta4

  Be extremely careful with this command, it could wipe your home directory if you type it wrong!

All basic options in the installation program are fine. You do not need to change anything. Once you're done, all IE applications will be stored in the .ies4linux/ folder in your home directory, with links for IE 5, IE 5.5, IE 6, and IE 7 in your ~/bin folder.

You're done. If you want to run your versions of IE, simply open a terminal and type

ie5
ie55
ie6
ie7

Fantastic isn't it! You can run various versions of IE, firefox, konqueror, and opera all on your linux box, and at the same time. It's really handy for website development!

Links:

• the wine project,
• cabextract
• IEs4Linux homepage: don't forget to make a donation!
• latest news for IEs4Linux, with instructions on how to deal with IE 7.
• Internet Explorer 7 on Linux on webexpose, where I first got the trick...