Internet Explorer on Mac OS X 10.4

On my Mac, I usually browse with Safari. Sometimes I use Firefox, especially for Web development because of the great Firebug extension, at home, but I mostly use it at work. Rare are the times I use Internet Explorer. If I’m using it, it’s either to test my Web sites in the most popular Web browser, or I’m at one of my friends’ place who doesn’t know about alternative browsers.

I needed to run Internet Explorer on my Mac to test my Web sites. The only way to do so is to install Wine for a Windows “emulator,” and IEs 4 Linux, which supposedly can install Internet Explorer 5, 5.5 SP1, and 6 on Linux or a Mac running Wine.

I found a page, linked below, with simple instructions (for the computer geek) on how to accomplish this:

http://www.z3lab.org/sections/blogs/philipp-weitershausen/2006_11_30_how…

However, I’ve encountered a few problems. When running Wine’s configure, it kept telling me that FontForge wasn’t installed. I did install it, using both MacPorts and Fink. The tiny oversight: the fontforge wasn’t in my path. Simple fix:


export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin


I was able to compile Wine. However, when either myself or the IEs 4 Linux install script tried to start the Wine server, wineserver would return an error message: Can’t check in server_mach_port.

How irritating… It was working for the person who wrote the page linked above. Why not me? Well, the author wrote the article on 30 November 2006. I decided to download the version of Wine which was the most recent in that time. I got Wine 0.9.25, released on 18 November 2006. I decompressed it and compiled it. And it works. I then ran the install script for IEs 4 Linux and that worked too. I just needed to include search paths, which can be done automatically if specified in the .bashrc file:


export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin:/usr/local/bin


The screenshot is the proof of my success!