First of all: A Happy New year!

Diona uses the Linux setup we have here at home. Previously all machines were running Gentoo but a couple of months ago the switch was made to Ubuntu as the constant compiling and tweaking took too much of our time. And we have a more purposeful use for our computers than constant downloading and compiling.

Back to installing Internet Explorer 6 on Ubuntu:

First make sure that the following packages are installed:

  • wine
  • xdialog
  • alien

If not, install them using the following command on the command line:

sudo apt-get install wine alien xdialog

Next, download winetools. Grab the .rpm. On the command line go to the directory where the winetools were downloaded and issue the following command:

sudo alien -i winetools-0.9-3jo.i386.rpm

Replace the name of the RPM if necessary of course :).

Winetools needs Xdialog, but on Ubuntu that is not installed in the place where it is expected. So go to the Winetools directory and make a symbolic link to Xdialog:

cd /usr/local/winetools

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/Xdialog

Go back to your home directory (not really necessary, I just like to be there when possibly goofing things up) and start the Winetools using the following command: wt. Everything after that should be straightforward. You get the possibility to install IE6 from here. Do not forget to install all the MS fonts.

Winetools is so nice to create Wine launcher scripts in ~/bin, so IE can be started using the following command:

~/bin/ie6

But you might find it more convenient to make an entry in the main menu of your desktop environment.