IE and Kubuntu are go!

I was having a discussion with a web developer friend of mine the other day about Kubuntu. He made the very valid point that he still needs a windows install around to do thorough testing of IE browser support on a windows box.

Well I have IE 5.5 and 6.0 running on Kubuntu (and no I'm not using VMWare). I found a very nifty little script in my blog reading this morning which installs IE 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 for you (you can choose which versions you want). The magic all happens with IEs4Linux (also check out his blog - looks like IE7 support is there too - maybe this will convince me to finally install IE7). It installs with a minimum of fuss and hassle. In fact with ADSL2+ the install is lightning fast.

The only requirement is that you have Wine installed and cabextract (a program to extract Microsoft Cabinet files). Using Adept Manager I had these installed in minutes. Following the Kubuntu instructions on the IEs4Linux was incredibly straightfoward. Within minutes I had two fancy looking IE icons on my desktop (an upside down IE logo in what looks like a cocktail glass), and I was ready to go.

I have a screenshot of IE 5.5, IE 6.0 and Firefox running behind it. No hacks, no pain. It Just Works. Very impressive. Just to prove that it really is IE I've loaded up Bento's blog Waffle which proudly gives IE the middle finger. You can see what I mean in the screenshot :)

So while it's not IE on Windows, it's about as close as you'll get whilst running a Linux distro. I say give it a whirl :)