54 Installing Internet Explorer on Linux

Note: You can also read an alternative installation procedure which allows you to install Explorer version 5, 5.5 and 6 side-by-side, also via Wine.

1. Background

This is not a joke. Apparently, the Wine emulator project has reached a point where installing Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 on a Linux box is an almost painless affair.

Until a while ago I used to install Win4Lin, for which an aquintance had a license they never used (go figure). Win4Lin is a fine piece of software and manages to succesfully emulate a Windows 9x box very well. The trouble is that it requires kernel patches and a certain kernel configuration, and this limits what I can do with my kernel in regard to configuration and other 3rd party patches. Recently, and after a switch to Debian, I’ve had a really hard time making it work, and no luck at all running Explorer in it (it would freeze the emulator).

I’ve had it for a while with full OS emulators, hence I won’t try VMware either.

So here’s Wine to the rescue. Forums reports regarding Explorer running under Wine have caught my eye and I’ve looked up more info. It’s all true. I’m capable of running Explorer on my Debian Linux right now. The attached screenshot shows Internet Explorer running under the Blackbox window manager.

2. Installation

On with the install. There’s a couple of tricks you can employ which will make your life a whole lot easier.

2.1. Wine

First of all you need the wine package files, of course. They are available for various Linux distributions as ready-made packages.

Although Debian (of course) carries Wine in its official repositories, you’d be well advised to go with the .deb packages offered by the Wine repository. There’s a tutorial which helps you with that.

Be warned however that the Wine apt repository has limited speed and would only work at about 7 KBps for me, so downloading the 12 MB of the wine package took a while.

Warning: I could not run the IE setup under anything but the latest Wine straight from the Wine repository (it would crash otherwise). Your mileage may vary.

2.2. Wine Tools

Next, install the winetools package. It is a great graphical install helper which will do everything else for you, so you most definitely want it.

It comes as either a .rpm package or a binary tarball. Although it recommends the tarball for Debian, the rpm will work just fine if you have rpm installed on your Debian machine.

Once you got it, run wt from a terminal. After the introductory screens, go under “Base Setup” and just run through all the items there. At the very least you should install DCOM98 and the Arial font. The rest of the Microsoft Core Fonts can be installed from the “system software” subsection.

Internet Explorer is also available as an install item. Wine Tools is so nice that it fully automates the install process for you and even creates a shell script called ie6 and places it in ~/bin/, for your convenience.

Provided your Wine version can cope with ie6setup.exe without crashing, mere minutes later you will be enjoying a working Internet Explorer on your Linux desktop.

Caution: My copy of wt apparently insisted to use puzzle.dl.sourceforge.net, which would not work. I worked around this by binding this domain name to 193.1.193.66 in my /etc/hosts (which is the Heanet/Ireland mirror).

2.3. winecfg

There’s another tool you may want to get, called winecfg. It should be available from your distribution repositories (it is in Debian). Wine has at some point switched from text config files in .ini-like format to a format more akin to .reg, so this winecfg is a powertool that allows you to easily edit your personal Wine configuration (drive letters and locations and such).

3. How well does it perform?

In terms of raw speed, it feels a little more sluggish than it does on Windows. In case you care, here’s a benchmark done over at Bench JS. It shows the JavaScript interpreter for IE on Linux being about half as fast as the average IE 6.0 (running, presumably, on Windows). (By the way, I did tell them I run Linux, I guess they didn’t believe me and wrote Windows instead :)).