Building IE on Linux
Posted by rick Sat, 18 Feb 2006 18:46:00 GMT
There’s been some interest from people who want to set up “IE on Linux” as we mentioned we were doing to help with automating IE testing. As you’ll see, the process is merely a testament to the hard work done by others to make this not only possible but easy.
First off, make sure you’ve got licenses for the software you’re installing. I’m not pretending to be a lawyer, not pretending to interpret the Microsoft EULAs that might apply. I think it’s safe to say you’d better have licenses on hand.
I’ll be assuming you don’t already have Wine installed and that you don’t already have a ~/.wine directory already. If you do you’ll need to take that into account. I’m installing on Debian (unstable), but I’ll be installing from tarballs, so as long as you’ve got the dependencies needed to compile wine you should be ok.
Ok, it’s just this simple:
- download the 0.9.7 Wine tarball here
- tar xvj wine-0.9.7.tar.bz2
- cd wine-0.9.7
- ./tools/wineinstall
- cd ..
- tar xvfz winetools-0.9jo-III.tar.gz
- cd winetools-0.9jo-III
- su
- ./install
- exit
- cd ..
- wt
- do Base Config
- create a Fake Windows Drive
- Install TrueTypeFont Arial
- Install DCOM 98
- Install Microsoft Foundation Classes 4.x
- Install Internet Explorer SP1 English
Now, if like us you are behind a proxying firewall, you’ll have a headache when trying to install IE since the installer doesn’t typically see your proxy. To install from behind the proxy you’ll need to do the following:
- Wait for the download to eventually time out and fail.
- Click “Advanced”
- Click the proxy checkbox, then fill in our proxy IP and port.
- (For some reason I had problems typing in the proxy info boxes and had to use cut-and-paste to get the info in there(?!).
When you’re done, exit out of Winetools. Now you’ve got a .wine/ directory with a “C drive” with IE6 installed. I’d advise backing up .wine/ so you can recreate this configuration with a one-liner (now, don’t you wish that working with Windows was always this easy? Heh.)
To run IE now, simply run IE:
% wine ”$HOME/.wine/c/Program Files/Internet Explorer/IEXPLORE.EXE”
You can append arguments for IE to the end of the command-line.
I’ve verified that Javascript does indeed work, but PNG support is still missing. I haven’t had a chance to try the things mentioned in this forum yet to see if I can get PNGs working. Any feedback on that issue is welcome.
