One of the many limitations I had on projects when using Linux (especially when contracting) was that the clients wanted their web application tested on the latest versions of IE — that’s “Internet Explorer” for those outside the webdev circle.

I’ve always been fond of Linux, especially Gentoo and more recently I have developed a love of Debian-based systems like Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

As a web developer, it is not very common to find someone in the workplace that uses anything other than PC or Mac, with the Mac users being few and far between….at least before my current job.

It has been the main reason I keep an active Windows XP partition running on my development box (in addition to Quicken).

Enter ies4linux…a sweet little bash script that installs the latest (and oldest) versions of Internet Explorer….from 5.0 to 7.0 (w/beta install).

If you want IE7 you’ll have to install the beta version, which is somewhat buried in a downloads directory.

You can watch the development, although it seems somewhat stale lately, at ies4linux developer’s blog.

I had a few broken package downloads the first time I ran the 2.5-beta install for ies4linux, but re-running it seem to fix the problem. Also, afaik Flash 9 still does not work on 64-bit hardware.

I was able to install it on mac osx, but it is rather ugly. I opted for WinXP on parallels with “multipleIEs” for Windows– google it ;)