How To Install The Internet Explorer On Ubuntu 8.04

Version 1.0
Author: Oliver Meyer <o [dot] meyer [at] projektfarm [dot] de>

This document describes how to install the Internet Explorer (different versions) on Ubuntu 8.04 with IEs4Linux. Some users - especially web developers/designers need different versions of the Internet Explorer to test their pages.

This howto is a practical guide without any warranty - it doesn't cover the theoretical backgrounds. There are many ways to set up such a system - this is the way I chose.

1 Preliminary Note

For security reasons you should NOT use the Internet Explorer to surf the internet. Use it only for development - for example to test if the web page that you've created works/looks as expected within the Internet Explorer.

2 Needed Packages

Let's install some needed packages.

sudo apt-get install wine cabextract binfmt-support

3 Installation

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

Next you'll see this window - select which versions of the Internet Explorer shall be installed, mark the corresponding checkbox if you want support for Flash (IE6 only) and choose if/where you want to have launchers. Click on "OK" to proceed. Please note that you can enable the installation of IE7 (experimental) in the advanced options.

The selected packages are being installed.

Finished - you can now close the window.

4 GNOME Launcher

On my system the menu entries were not created by the installer - so I had to create them manually. Right click on the GNOME menu and select "Edit Menus".

Click on "Programming" on the left side and afterwards on "New Item" on the right side. Insert a name, the command and optionally a comment for the new launcher. The executables for the IEs are located in your home directory (/home/%your_username%/bin/ie%version%). The path for the IE-icon is /home/%your_username%/.ies4linux/ies4linux.png. Create such a launcher for all IE versions that you've installed.