Internet Explorer on Linux with Bordeaux

Written by Tom Wickline

Monday, 18 August 2008 22:02

About Internet Explorer :

Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and 6 but steadily declining since, despite the introduction of IE7. Microsoft spent over 100 million dollars (USD) a year in the late 1990s, with over 1000 people working on IE by 1999. source

About BordeauxGroup, Inc.:

Founded in 2008, The Bordeaux Group focuses on the development of Free Software solutions enabling legacy Windows applications to run on Linux systems and other non-Windows operating systems. Bordeaux for Linux is designed to aide in the transition and migration to non-Windows platforms by bringing Windows software to Linux. The company is privately held. For more information about the Bordeaux Group please visit http://bordeauxgroup.com/

Bordeaux cost $20.00 and at this time and sadly there isnt a demo version, hopefully this will change and a demo will be released for in the 2.x release cycle. There is a possibility a standard free version will be released with just a couple small applications supported and a pro version with more application support.

Internet Explorer Install :

Bordeaux is dependant on Wine 1.0 being installed on your system, so the first thing you need to do is download and install Wine for your distro if its not already installed. Once you have Wine installed open a terminal and run $ winecfg this will create a .wine directory in your home directory.

Bordeaux should have created a menu entry in your Applications menu, go to Bordeaux and open the Bordeaux Configuration Manager

All you have to do is double click on "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6" and Bordeaux will take over and do the install for you. After the install is complete there should be shortcuts in your Applications Menu and on your Desktop for Internet Explorer. At this time plug-ins don't work correctly in Internet Explorer on Linux but page rendering works without any problems.

I posted a video of the install on YouTube, sorry about it being blurry but you will none the less get a idea of just how simple it is to install Internet Explorer on Linux with Bordeaux.