Automate download, install, config of IE-only VM's with VirtualBox (Linux/OSX)

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms#readme

by donohoe • 15 years ago

219 58 15 years ago

github.com

Maci• 15 years ago

Alternatively: http://utilu.com/IECollection/

IE 1.0 to IE 8.0 as standalone versions in a single installer.

bittermang• 15 years ago

IE Collection is great on Windows. I recommend it and use it often.

tadfisher• 15 years ago

IE 7 and 8 are not available in the installer; I'm running Win7 x64 with IE 9.0 installed. Falling back to XP Mode for now.

killion2• 15 years ago

So if you go to Tools > Developer Tools the browser modes for IE 7 and 8 are not there?

brianjolney• 15 years ago

from the github wiki:

Rough VM size estimates:

IE7: 13GB IE8: 8.4GB IE9: 13GB Currently, the script will leave the compressed RAR files in place, which means you're looking at something like 45 freaking GB if you don't prune them manually (in ~/.ievms/vhd/). This wasn't a big deal for me on my company workstation, but kinda sucks on my Macbook Air, so I'll be adding a cleanup option shortly. You probably don't need to keep the compressed files around anyway since we take a snapshot like you mentioned.

aninteger2• 15 years ago

I know you aren't the creator of those VMs but, any idea why they are so big?

What's weird is that there's a jump from 8.4 GB to 13 GB on Windows 7. What is on the IE9 vhd that isn't on the IE8 vhd?

Edit: Nevermind, from the official link the IE9 vm comes with additional tools.

pointyhat2• 15 years ago

On Win7, the jump is due to WinSxS. Every DLL several times and several versions. DLL hell solved.

wiredfool• 15 years ago

Is there a way to make this work with KVM, or is this using something special from the virtualbox distrubution to convert the .vhds?

sciurus• 15 years ago

qemu-img can convert the VirtualPC (VHD) image format.

For example, qemu-img convert -O qcow2 Win7_IE8.vhd Win7_IE8.qcow2

sp332• 15 years ago

I thought VirtualBox could mount the .vhds natively? I'm pretty sure I'm running one right now...

RexRollman• 15 years ago

Personally speaking, I would love to see Google release an offical, downloadable ChromeOS images that could be used with VMWare or Virtualbox. Something like that could be a real boon for some users.

fierarul4• 15 years ago

The magic in ChromeOS is the hardware Google uses from the Chromebooks. There is an unofficial site with images for Chromium(?)OS but it doesn't look pretty.

rdl• 15 years ago

What is the magic beyond SSD (and good acpi/power management integration), trusted boot (using a TPM), and OpenGL?

mdaniel• 15 years ago

FWIW, my copy of Parallels 6 has a "Download Chrome OS" in its File menu. Last time I tried it, after some delay I was met with a functional copy of Chrome OS (I don't even recall having to answer any questions).

fierarul4• 15 years ago

I can't believe Microsoft is giving away free Windows licenses as long as you use the vm image for IE.

Which is basically the only reason I do have an old Windows XP vm on my Mac.

michaelbuckbee3• 15 years ago

You can't get the VMs to pass WGA so they are only good for 30 days before they have to be reset; which pretty much makes them only good for testing / qa purposes.

This seems like a very reasonable decision on Microsoft's part: they make it easier / legal / quick to test on their platform and more people will support and develop on it.

killion2• 15 years ago

By reset do you mean they have to be redownloaded?

fierarul4• 15 years ago

I dunno, it could be useful for a number of things.

For example, I know a few online banking solutions that are IE-only. The most you need there might be a certificate, so resetting the vm every 30 days isn't such a big deal.

I try to keep the VMs as small as possible anyhow and if you need data, you keep it in a VM shared folder that you map in the Windows guest.

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

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

Bad trend in the open-source community. Please don't ask your users to install stuff this way. Not that you can't be trusted, it leads to people dropping their guard.

bretthopper• 15 years ago

This comes up every time an install script like that is used, and in a lot of cases, it's a warrantless criticism.

Projects like this are obviously targeted towards developers as they're hosted on github. If you really want to check out what the script is doing, just look at the file. Or better yet, clone the repo and use it/install however you want.

chc• 15 years ago

Is it particularly worse than downloading and blindly running the code in separate steps? I don't think the majority of users have ever extensively audited the software they run, so it's not exactly a new trend. If you are capable of evaluating this script, you already know how to do it.

trafficlight• 15 years ago

I would bet a fair amount would open the script up in an editor and say, "Yep. That's code alright".

michaelbuckbee3• 15 years ago

I kind of view bash piping as the worlds easiest install package.

Unequivocally, it is dangerous to run random pieces of code from the internet, it just seems odd to me that if this same code was in a nice packaged install wizard nobody would say anything about it.

wahnfrieden• 15 years ago

Maybe it should include a first step of piping it to less for review, followed by piping to bash if it looks fine. Slightly better...

Groxx4• 15 years ago

Why is it worse than running an installer? It has identical capabilities, but the .sh file can be read.

mtogo• 15 years ago

If you install a package via the package managers on debian, ubuntu, fedora, and other major distros you can be reasonably sure that the packages aren't malicious because they've been security reviewed before they made it into APT/YUM/etc. Downloading some shell script off the internet and running it without even reading it first is a really bad idea by comparison.

irahul2• 15 years ago

> Bad trend in the open-source community. Please don't ask your users to install stuff this way. Not that you can't be trusted, it leads to people dropping their guard.

And what will be the right way to do it? The way people don't drop their guard? `./configure && make && sudo make install`? Or `sudo apt-get install`? How are any of these or many other options seemingly better than this?

lloeki• 15 years ago

You probably mean 'add-apt-repository foorepo && apt-get update && apt-get install foopkg' or 'dpkg -i foopkg' (as root) because as is, 'apt-get install' is innocuous given one uses the default trusted, signed and whatnot repos.

acdha• 15 years ago

I'd support this more if they weren't using https - since the user's going to run it anyway, there's no real advantage over any other means of getting this file onto their system. Well-known http:// urls are worse since they allow interesting spoofing attacks if they become popular.

aninteger2• 15 years ago

Adding the link to download the VMs directly from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575

pygy_5• 15 years ago

A small meta-comment:

xdissent[1], the author of this package, is a HN user, but he has negative karma because his fourth comment was snarky and got heavily downvoted. Even though he's aware of the ban he clings to this handle and continues to post messages seen by almost no one (he posted twice on this comment page [2,3]). The rest of the messages eversince the incident have been fine (enable "showdead" in the user control pannel if you want to read them).

Since he seems attached to the handle, it would be nice if he could be upvoted back to the positive side so that he can once again participate.

He's got three upvotable posts in history (before the ban). His karma is currently at -32. This means that he needs 11 brave souls to break even. You know what to do :).

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xdissent, comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xdissent

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955430

3. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955411

Edit: 58 minutes later: -10. Thanks to the upvoters.

pygy_5• 15 years ago

xdissent: you appear to be still banned (at least, 4 hours after my post, you still were). Since you now have a positive karma, could you answer this post as a test?

tripzilch• 15 years ago

I don't seem to see his posts unless I enable "showdead".

I didn't even know karma worked this way on HN. Quite ridiculous, IMHO, to completely hide someone if their karma runs too low. Especially if it can happen by unfortunate accident and ends up hiding a positive contributor completely from view--basically means the system is broken.

xdissent• 15 years ago

Testing 1 2 3. This thing on?

pygy_5• 15 years ago

You're still banned. Time to drop a line to pg.

thristian• 15 years ago

I have, on occasion, wanted to write almost exactly this script - but the thing that stopped me was that VirtualPC apparently emulates a slightly different IDE controller than VirtualBox, and so when Windows XP starts up in the new VM, it doesn't have a driver installed for the IDE controller, can't find its own hard-drive, and blue-screens. It's possible to edit the registry to install the required driver, but that requires booting into Windows... a Catch-22 if ever there was one.

I was eager to see how the problem had been solved... but apparently Windows Vista and Windows 7 don't have that particular problem, and the IE6 VM (with Windows XP) just says "IE6 support is currently disabled".

That's kind of sad; at least for the light web-development I've done, IE7 and IE8 aren't nearly as fussy and hair-pulling as IE6.

ck2• 15 years ago

Why not use IEtester and run all versions of IE on a vista/w7 free vmware player install?

W7 trial iso will work without a key, it will just shutdown every 30 minutes which is fine for testing purposes.

IEtester also has debugbar which sometimes is even better than some firefox tools I use.

idrinkmusic• 15 years ago

As far as I'm concerned, IE Tester doesn't have an exact copy of IE's code, hence not 100% reliable.

jarofgreen2• 15 years ago

+1 IETester better than nothing and a decent fallback, but running the actual IE's better than IETEster.

jarofgreen2• 15 years ago

I've found IEtester to be really keen to cache code, to the point of having to clear cache's in settings sometimes - clearly not great for development.

arb99• 15 years ago

3 hours later (slow internet) and got all 3 working perfectly on OS X (snow leopard).

hotice2• 15 years ago

Is it legal?

Groxx4• 15 years ago

The images and everything Microsofty are provided by Microsoft for this use. VirtualBox is open source and ideal for something like this.

The automation might be mired in some obscure clause on either end, but it's just doing things you can legally do by hand.

hotice2• 15 years ago

Thanks!

ajtaylor• 15 years ago

Only last week I downloaded the IE9 VM's mentioned here, but got the never ending BSOD-reboot loop when trying to use them in VirtualBox. This is going to make my day when I get back in the office next week!

speg• 15 years ago

How do you get away with saying: "With a single command, you can have IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9 running in separate virtual machines." - when in the first paragraph it says IE6 is not supported.

Automate download, install, config of IE-only VM's with VirtualBox (Linux/OSX)

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