Fingerprints of Casper Fabricius

Benjamin Quorning gave a great tip at the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade mailing list the other day: How to run (Windows) Internet Explorer on your (Intel-based) Mac without having to boot up Parallels, VMWare, or any other kind of time-consuming PC-emulation software. This is made possible by the IEs 4 Linux project (no, that’s no IE 4 on Linux, it’s IEs for Linux, and IE 4 is not supported, just 6, 5.5 and 5) which provides a simple way to run IE on Linux and, as it turns out, OS X on Intel-based Macs.

While the article on the IEs 4 Linux provides one method for getting this up and running, I tend to like Benjamin’s more as it uses MacPorts, so I’m going to repeat it here for reference. A prerequisite for the tutorial is to have X11 installed, which is part of the optional developer tools that comes with OS X, and you also need MacPorts, which seems to be the best package system for Darwin at the moment.

To install IEs4Linux and its dependencies, execute these commands in your terminal of choice:

sudo port install cabextract wget wine
wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux

The first line installs several components required to run IEs4Linux, most importantly Wine, a framework allowing many Windows applications to run on Unix-based systems, including OS X. The other lines download and start the impressively user-friendly installation of IEs4Linux. After completing the installation, Benjamin explains that to run Internet Explorer, you must startup the X11 console (/Applications/Utilities/X11.app) and execute these commands:

export PATH="/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH"
~/bin/ie6

That’s a bit too inconvenient for my taste, since want to be able to place a link to IE directly in my Dock, or run it by executing a simple command in Quicksilver. So I have created a shell script in my home directory (you could also place it in the Applications directory if you like that better) called ie6 with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
open-x11 .ies4linux/bin/ie6

I also need to make it executable by running chmod +x ie6 in the terminal. Now this gives me the ability to execute the shell script from terminal, to call it from Quicksilver (by writing ie6), and to drag it to the right/lower part of the Dock (the part with the trash can in it) with an ugly generic document icon. I want it in my Dock with a nice high quality Internet Explorer icon so I can start just like any other application, and for that purpose I wrapped the shell script as an application:

Download IE6 application

• Requires IEs4Win to be installed in the default location (~/.ies4win)
• Must be dragged to the Applications directory in your home directory (create one if you don’t have one), not to the general Applications directory (this is due to my limited shell scripting / X11 abilities, ~ didn’t seem to work as a reference to the home directory in X11).