If you are web designer and don’t use Microsoft Windows and also don’t want to buy windows licence than you would be happy to know that Microsoft is providing free Windows VHD images which allows to run Internet explorer 7, 8 & 9 on any Linux distribution and Mac OSX.
To install Microsoft Windows VHD images you need to have a visualization software like VirtualBox. To make this process more easier there is a script which automates whole installation process which includes downloading and installing VirtualBox and downloading and extracting Microsoft Windows VHDs. This script is developed by xdissent and can be found on Github.
Advantages
- No need to buy Windows license.
- No need to install windows.
- Websites often render differnetly in each Internet Explorer version, to ensure standard user experience across all browsers you should test websites in
- Internet Explorer 7.8 & 9.
- Snapshot automatically reverts to original machine state.
Disadvantages
The major huge disadvantage is the disk requirement, you will need 45GB of space in order to install all three IE 7,8 & 9 VHDs.
Installation on Ubuntu
First make sure that you have VirtualBox installed, you will need curl and unrar packages also before script execution.
Install curl and unrar via following command.
sudo apt-get install curl unrar
Then you need to execute the script, make sure that you have 45GB of free space and good working internet connection.
curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash
The above command is for all IE versions but you want specific IE version than use following command.
curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="9" bash
IEVMS_VERSIONS=”9″ indicates that it is version 9 downloading script. For IE 8 use IEVMS_VERSIONS=”8″ and IEVMS_VERSIONS=”7″ for IE 7.
After installation is completed you will find IE 7, 8 & 9 in VirtualBox, just start the machines with password=Password1
Note: There is no need to activate windows, you can use for 30 days and when trail ends just reset the virtual machine.