At work, me and my boss, Ali, (we’re the developers) both use Macbook Pros as our development computers. Which is great for most things, I love Macs. The only problem is that we’re developing an online site, and the reality is that Internet Explorer is still the most dominant browser. Right now, we’re using Parallels to test our site on IE but it’s a slow process. Enter…IEs 4 Linux.

Even with that name it does work with Mac OSX, there is even a FAQ entry for running IEs 4 Linux on OSX. Here is the process I went through to install IEs 4 Linux on my machine:

Requirements:

• MacPorts – http://www.macports.org (You can also use Fink)
• X11 SDK and X11 User installed (These can be found on your install DVD)

Steps:

First, I installed the required packages through MacPorts for Wine:
[cc lang="bash"]sudo port install cabextract wget fontforge freetype[/cc]
Note: If you have a problem with installing these packages, you might need to run the command “clean” with port. This removes all the temporary files created. E.g. “sudo port clean –all freetype”

After installing these packages, I then installed Wine:
[cc lang="bash"]sudo port install wine[/cc]

All that’s left is running the install script for IEs 4 Linux. Then you can run the X11 application installed with X11User and call the command ie, ie55 or ie5 in xterm.

Now that is the way that it was supposed to work, in reality I came across a few problems:

You have an Apple X11 installation already:

[cc lang="bash"]
You have an Apple X11 installation already.
MacPorts will not overwrite it.

If you really want to use XFree86 instead,
please move it aside first :
[/cc]
This was caused by having X11 SDK installed but not X11 User installed. X11 User is located in /System/Installation/Packages/X11User.pkg. After installing, make sure to run the “clean -all” command.

Wine is not found:

This error message shows up when xterm does not have a properly set up PATH. To correct this, read this page on Options for MacPorts’ shell and X11 Environment.

Good luck!