Testing in Internet Explorer  

Unfortunately, my products need to work in Internet Explorer. This is normally pretty bad news for web developers but it’s something that we have to deal with. And, unfortunate again (or fortunate, depending on how you look at it), you can’t install Internet Explorer in Ubuntu. But you can install Virtual Machines, and Microsoft has provided some for the specific case of testing your sites for compatibility issues in different versions of IE.

1. sudo apt-get install virtualbox (Note: this installs everything related to virtualbox, I think you could get away with just doing sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.3 but I usually take the “go big or go home” attitude)
2. Look at modern.ie for the .txt file that corresponds to the Windows/IE version combination that you need and then run wget -i https://az412801.vo.msecnd.net/vhd/VMBuild_20131127/VirtualBox/IE10_Win7/Linux/IE10.Win7.For.LinuxVirtualBox.txt substituting IE10_Win7… for the text file that you’re going to use. This takes awhile.
3. chmod +x IE10.Win7.For.LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx
4. ./IE10.Win7.For.LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx
5. This will have created a virtual box image wherever you ran these commands, now is a good time to move this to a good location. I like to use Documents > Virtual Box Images so that I know where they are. They’re pretty large (hence the weird download procedure) so if you want to remove them after you’ve imported them to virtual box you can go ahead and do that. However, you might want to keep them around for reasons explained later.
6. Go to your unity menu and search for virtualbox (or virtualbox in the command line) and then go to File > Import Appliance.
7. Select your image and click through to import it.

Now you can run this instance of your VM. They have a 30-day limit so you have to import it fresh when that timer runs out on you (and if you’ve deleted your image you now have to download it all over again) which is the only down side of this process. A major upside of course is that it’s free!

Issues #

If you got this error

./IE10.Win7.For.LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

you’ll need to run apt-get install lib32stdc++6 before you can run ./…part1.sfx.