IE 7 and IE 8 on Linux with Wine 1.1.20

Posted on by cillian

In an interview with Jeremy White (C.E.O. of CodeWeavers) on The Linux Action Show he mentioned they have IE7 working in CrossOver Office in the latest beta release of version 8 and that the latest version of Wine has lots of improvements that make this possible. I thought I’d try it out as I’m working on a new site and would like to be able to test it. I installed the latest version available for Mandriva 2009.0 in the package manager and did the following dance:

Created a fresh ~/.wine
Ran winetricks and set the version to win2k and installed IE6.
Ran winetricks and set the version to winxp.
Installed IE7:
$ wine IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe
Installed IE8:
$ wine IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe
I think it installed the first time, but when I tried to run it, it threw an error. For no good reason I ran the installer again. After that it works fine (except it doesn’t seem to run any JavaScript). I think it is very usable for testing layout issues.

Some sites throw an error: “Internet Explorer couldn’t download %ws” and not having JavaScript working is a problem, perhaps I’m just missing a dll or something. I think it’s really great news though. I bet the CrossOver Office folks will have this polished pretty soon (if they don’t already).

It’s really phenominal work the Wine community do and it is greatly appreciated. I have no copy of Microsoft Windows and from time to time I really need to run a Windows application (e.g. Tax Software from the Government) and without Wine this wouldn’t be possible. Up until today I could only partially test in IE7 so it is great to know that I now have a way to make sure that sites I make are at least functional in Internet Explorer. Unless the site is for a client I’m not going to go to kill myself trying to make it work perfectly though, I tend to assume that people who use Internet Explorer are accustomed to things not working perfectly 😀

Published by cillian

11 thoughts on “IE 7 and IE 8 on Linux with Wine 1.1.20”

  2. I was able to get the javascript to function by installing wscript 5.6 before installing ie6. Also, I had the strange error you mentioned above, but instead of letting the setup finish I copied the extracted dlls into the system32 folder and that solved the problem.

  6. Silly of me not to mention it … I think there can only be one reason … I’m a web developer and I need to test that sites work on all the popular browsers.

    1. Sorry to disappoint you in a way, but any application (including web browsers) that runs under wine and needs to show HTML pages will use wine gecko. And that my friend is based on a custom version of Mozilla’s Gecko Layout Engine. So technically what will appear on your screen is not how it would appear on IEs, but rather what would appear on Mozilla’s custom engine.

      I’m also sad a bit, I need it not only for developing websites, but also for college 😦

      But hey thanks for that, now those who really love IEs can use IE7 and 8 on linux 🙂 /*Hah no reason for you for not switching to linux you bozo!!*/

      BTW I think this “Gecko” stuff should be added to your post.

      AnxiousNut

      1. Hi Anxious,

        I believe you’re mistaken. I guess you’re referring to: http://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko “Wine implements its own version of Internet Explorer … When your application tries to display a web page, it loads Wine’s custom Gecko”. This means that when some application running on wine tries to display html e.g. in a notification, help etc. wine uses the gecko rendering engine. When you actually run IE however, it runs IE proper.

        You can verify this by testing some of the many known IE rendering bugs. I didn’t get javascript working correctly, but it’s a long time since I’ve tried, and Jeremy says he did, so I think unless you need some ActiveX stuff or extra plugins you should be able to use IE under wine both for testing and for IE specific web sites. Good luck!

      2. If you’re sure that’s good news, but this isn’t working write with me. It’s showing stuff how firefox would!!! But then again, i might have done something wrong.

        Thanks for replying and correcting me 🙂
        AnxiousNut

  7. Anxious Nut is mistaken, cillian is correct. Also a web developer, I’ve been using IE in wine for some time now to test against CSS rendering bugs in IE.

    IE in wine certainly serves it’s purpose. There are also times in which web applications are built upon MS proprietary technologies and only IE browsers are compatible with all the features. My organization put themselves in that box, so I must to run IE 6 or greater just to use one particular web application.

    So there ya go. IE in wine, very important. Wine for Linux, invaluable.

Leave a comment