Microsoft offers virtual Windows images that have Internet Explorer of various versions available. This is useful for testing websites. Getting it installed in a VirtualBox is problematic, as the images were originally designed to run in Microsoft Virtual PC. Various scripts are available on the web to perform this automatically - here's my instructions for doing this on Ubuntu 11.04.

Install pre-requisites

We need to install virtualbox, curl and unrar to get this to work:

$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose curl unrar

Run Script

Next, run the script

$ curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash

This failed for me with

ERROR: Failed to install Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack from /home/tjs/.ievms
/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.0.10_Ubuntu-72436.vbox-extpack, error code (0)

This is because the script couldn't download the particular version of this VirtualBox extension for my system.

I fixed this by downloading it manually from http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.0.10/. I saved the file Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.0.10-72436.vbox-extpack over the top of the failed download filename so that the script would find it, and then ran the script again.

This then started downloading the large VM required. Go away for a few hours (it took me about 5 hours on a 8Mb ADSL line)

My install failed just after it downloaded the VM image - my version of VBoxManage didn't support --setuuid. This left me with a VM that wouldn't start because it didn't have an attached hard disk. I solved this by adding the hard drive in the VM settings. I pointed it to /home/drumcoder/.ievms/vhd/IE7/Windows Vista.vhd

I believe if I ran the script again it would start to download another Windows image containing IE8. As the first one was 6 images of 700Mb each, this will take even more time!

References

• https://github.com/xdissent/ievms
• https://github.com/maxmanders/msie2vbox - This script also supports IE6. I tried this first, but had problems on Ubuntu. YMMV.