Microsoft provides virtual machine disk images to facilitate website testing in multiple versions of IE, regardless of the host operating system. Unfortunately, setting these virtual machines up without Microsoft's VirtualPC can be extremely difficult. These scripts aim to facilitate that process using VirtualBox on Linux or OS X. With a single command, you can have IE7, IE8 and IE9 running in separate virtual machines.

• VirtualBox (https://virtualbox.org)
• Curl (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install curl)
• Linux Only: unrar (Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install unrar)
• Patience

• Install IE versions 7, 8 and 9 - no support for IE6 currently

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

• Install specific IE versions (IE7 and IE9 only for example):

  curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="7 9" bash

The VHD archives are massive and can take hours or tens of minutes to download, depending on the speed of your internet connection. You might want to start the install and then go catch a movie, or maybe dinner, or both.

Once available and started in VirtualBox, the password for ALL VMs is "Password1".

Each version is installed into a subdirectory of ~/.ievms/vhd/. If the installation fails for any reason (lost Internet connection, for instance), delete the version-specific subdirectory and rerun the install.

If nothing else, you can delete ~/.ievms and rerun the install.

Clean Snapshot

A snapshot is automatically taken upon install, allowing rollback to the pristine virtual environment configuration. Anything can go wrong in Windows and rather than having to worry about maintaining a stable VM, you can simply revert to the clean snapshot to reset your VM to the initial state.

The VMs provided by Microsoft will not pass the Windows Genuine Advantage and cannot be activated. Unfortunately for us, that means our VMs will lock us out after 30 days of unactivated use. By reverting to the clean snapshot the countdown to the activation apocalypse is reset, effectively allowing your VM to work indefinitely.