Cillian de Róiste

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