Internet Explorer in Linux with Ies4linux EXPLORER UNLEASHED Nina Hoff , Fotolia
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COVER STORY IEs4Linux Internet Explorer in Linux with IEs4Linux EXPLORER UNLEASHED Nina Hoff , Fotolia , Hoff Nina IEs4Linux lets web developers who work in Linux install Internet Explorer in just a couple of minutes to test their websites without booting Windows. BY HENDRIK HEUER eb designers who work in IEs4Linux not only removes the need valid Windows license (Windows 95 or Linux often find it difficult to for all this extra configuration, it also newer) to use Internet Explorer. The li- Wtest their work with all of to- supports the parallel installation of mul- cense terms [2] do not explicitly require day’s popular browsers. One factor that tiple versions of IE. you to run the product on Windows. adds difficulty is that Microsoft’s Inter- Ironically, Windows itself will not sup- In other words, it is sufficient to own net Explorer (IE) is not available in a na- port the use of more than one version various Windows operating systems. Be- tive version for Linux. Unfortunately, In- of Internet Explorer. In a blog, Microsoft cause of hardware bundling, a strategy ternet Explorer, which is known for its advises customers to run different that Microsoft has used for years to quirky interpretation of web standards, browser versions in separate virtual en- market its products, many households is so widespread that web designers vironments [1]. are likely to have an unused Windows can’t afford to ignore it. license already. The Wine run-time environment lets How IEs4Linux Works you run IE on Linux, and thus test your IEs4Linux is a collection of Flash own web pages without needing to boot shell scripts that automati- If necessary, Windows, but the task of configuring cally download the com- IEs4Linux will also Wine is often time consuming and diffi- pressed .cab packages for install the Adobe cult. IEs4Linux is a quick helper for get- the programs from the Mi- Flash 9 plugin. If you ting IE working on a Linux system. crosoft website, modify the will be enabling this configuration files, and use option during the in- Wine Inside Wine to install the software. stall, make sure you The Microsoft browser is an integral part The stable version of the read and accept the of Windows and thus draws heavily on script currently installs ver- Flash license before the Windows Application Programming sions 5.0, 5.5, and 6 of Inter- you start running the Interface (WinAPI). net Explorer. The current script [3]. Wine is designed to handle WinAPI beta version additionally references, but installing Internet Ex- supports the new Internet Installation plorer to work directly with Wine is still Explorer 7. For the install, you pretty much an adventure. Your mileage Figure 1: A new IE4sLinux GUI can choose between will depend on the version of Wine you Legal Situation further simplifies the task of the text-based in- use, but whatever happens, there are nu- The Internet Explorer li- installing Internet Explorer in staller that comes merous DLLs to prepare. cense requires you to own a Linux. with the stable ver- 42 ISSUE 83 OCTOBER 2007 WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM IEs4Linux COVER STORY Internet Explorer in Linux with IEs4Linux terface. To do so, they linked the IE7 ren- dering engine with the IE6 GUI. Because this workaround is very new and experimental, there are currently many restrictions to using Internet Ex- plorer 7 for testing. For example, you EXPLORER can’t use the program to access SSL-en- crypted websites, it will not render Flash animations, and cookies, which many sites use for session management, are UNLEASHED not currently supported. Quick Alternative IE Netrenderer [6] by Geotek Network Services provides a quick alternative to rendering graphical websites in Internet Explorer for test purposes. In contrast to Internet Explorer on Wine, IE Netren- derer doesn’t actually let you use and in- teractively test the content on the page; what it does do is let you identify major layout errors and gather an initial im- Figure 2: IEs4Linux is particularly useful for testing interactive websites, such as this pression of your page. Javascript demo from the Dojo toolkit. Conclusions sion [4] and the GUI-based dialog that directory created by the last step and an- The IEs4Linux project, which was was introduced with the beta software swer the prompts. founded by Sérgio Lopes, a Brazilian stu- [5]. Before launching the installer, open- A GUI (Figure 1) simplifies the instal- dent, turns out to be a convenient and SUSE 10.x users will need to install lation process for the IEs4Linux beta. fast alternative to installing IE manually. Wine; Ubuntu “Dapper Drake” and The software proved stable in our lab. The program finally gives Linux web de- “Edgy Eft” users need both Wine and To use the GUI, you additionally need signers the ability to test their own web- Cabextract. the Kommander or Python-gtk packages, sites in Internet Explorer without boot- The packages are available from the which your package manager should ing Windows – and without having to Universe repository, which you may have. After launching the GUI, select the master the complexities of Wine. need to enable in the Synaptic or Adept version of IE you will be using. The Internet Explorer on Wine will be par- package manager. Mandriva users can Advanced button lets you install experi- ticularly useful to web developers who run RPMDrake to install Wine. mental support for Internet Explorer 7. draw heavily on technologies such as The next step is to unpack the tarball AJAX (Figure 2) and need to test com- (tar xvzf ies4linux-2.0.5.tar.gz) and to Using IE plex layouts. ■ launch the text-based installer for the To launch one of the various Internet stable version of IEs4Linux. To do so, Explorer versions, type ie5, ie55, ie6, or INFO launch the ./ies4linux script in the new ie7. When using Internet Explorer, re- [1] MSDN IEBlog: member that the IEs4Linux developers http:// blogs. msdn. com/ ie/ archive/ weren’t interested in supporting a full- Troubleshooting 2006/ 11/ 30/ ie6-and-ie7- fledged browser. If the installer fails to download a pack- running-on-a-single-machine. aspx The project caters to the needs of web age, you can manually download the [2] IE license: http:// www. microsoft. com/ package and drop it into the ~/.ies4linux/ designers, and it restricts use to testing msdownload/ ieplatform/ ie/ license. txt downloads directory. of websites. Functions such as book- [3] Adobe Flash license: marks, which explicitly target end users, If the download fails to launch, the issue http:// www. adobe. com/ products/ may be a DNS server that is unable to are not supported by IEs4Linux. eulas/ players/ flash/ resolve download.microsoft.com to an [4] Installing IEs4Linux: IP address. In this case, just enter ping Internet Explorer 7 download.microsoft.com and make a http:// www. tatanka. com. br/ ies4linux/ The current beta version has experimen- page/ Installation note of the IP address. Then, working as tal support for Internet Explorer 7. Be- root, add the IP address to your /etc/ [5] Installing IEs4Linux beta: cause of the restrictions of the Wine in- hosts file: http:// www. tatanka. com. br/ ies4linux/ terface, you can’t actually install the IP_addr download.microsoft.com news/ complete browser, but the developers [6] IE Netrenderer: Replace IP_addr with the address you have found a way to help programmers noted from the ping command. http:// ipinfo. info/ netrenderer/ test their work with the new browser in- WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 83 OCTOBER 2007 43.