IE on Linux

It is very difficult to be completely free of Microsoft software... Maybe the Intranet on your workplace is "IE only" or there is a website you really would like to use, but the amateur who made it, has decided to 'optimize' the site for IE *sigh*.

Having a Windows partition, just to be able to use IE is totally overkill... plus the fact that you have to reboot every time you need to do IE stuff.

With a virtual machine, you don't need to reboot, but it is still too much of an effort to install a complete operating system, just to be able to use one piece of software.

Fortunately we have Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator). With Wine you'll only get the absolut minimum required to run IE on your current OS.

You can do it with Wine alone, but it can be a real hassle to get IE installed manually. Therefore you need a Wine helper like Wine-tools or IEs4Linux.

Wine-tools is the most widely used and well known, but it's also the most tricky... You must be very lucky to have a version of Wine and Wine-tools that will work together. And your installation will almost sertainly break the next time you update your software.

Instead use Wine with IEs4Linux. This combination is the most successful I have tried so far. It works instantly without any trouble at all... and you get 3 (yes 3!) versions of IE to play with.

3 steps to get you up and running with IEs4Linux

Install Wine and cabextract - On FC5 you can install both from Applications -> Add/Remove Software.

Download IEs4Linux and unpack it anywhere you want.

Double-click the ies4linux executable or run it from a terminal:

cd /path/to/unpacked/ies4linux/folder ./ies4linux

After a few seconds, 3 shortcuts appear on your desktop, one for each IE version (5.0, 5.5 and 6.0)....Voila!