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Finally! I’ve got Internet Explorer to run nicely under Puppy Linux under QEMU!

I call it Al’s Antique Browsing Appliance (virtual machine appliances are all the rage you know). And here’s my abbreviated howto in case anyone should want to replicate what I’ve done (though I’m sure there are easier ways, like not running 64 bit Debian in the first place).

1. Install QEMU on the host box. The QEMU packages in the Debian repositories work fine.
2. Download QEMU Launcher (not essential but it does make QEMU nice and easy to use).
3. Download a Puppy Linux ISO image (I used 2.17).
4. Using QEMU Launcher (or the relevant command line voodoo if you’re really bored) create a new configuration, put the Puppy ISO in the CD-ROM box, add a new image as Hard Disk 0 (I made my a gig and that’s plenty of room)
5. Select CD-ROM as the boot device. Boot the new virtual machine and follow the locale choosing stuff
6. Say hello to Puppy (and let your girlfriend give it a name, like ‘Pinkerton’)
7. (I needed this step to make the install work properly, you might not) Use fdisk from a shell to create a partition table and one big partition of type 83 on /dev/hda. I didn’t do this at first and the Puppy installer did a “superfloppy” install which then didn’t have a bootloader
8. Run the Puppy universal installer (from Menu -> Setup).
9. Follow the installer prompts (I think I just used the default all the way through)
10. Marvel when nothing gets confused as a virtual CD is installed to a virtual hard disk in a virtual computer
11. When it’s done, shutdown the virtual computer, change the boot device to the first disk and boot again
12. Now we’ve got an OS it’s time to install the stuff needed for IE, start with the Puppy Wine packages (download the files and click on them from the file manager)
13. Next, download Cabextract (used to, well, extract CAB files). I used the Slackware package and it worked fine.
14. Lastly, download IEs4Linux and extract and run (as per the instructions). This cool thing downloads various versions of IE straight from Microsoft and installs them.
15. Run IE! Running /root/bin/ie6 from a terminal should give you IE6 in all it’s wonderful crappiness.

And there you go, you have a virtual machine that can run IE5, 5.5 and 6 (and 7 with a beta of IEs4Linux) at the same time! Now go and test your websites!

Here’s the proof:

IE on Puppy Linux on Debian Etch

In other news, I got my Highers results today, I got an A for Computing and a B for Maths. I’m quite chuffed with Maths, it’s not my strong point and the last year has been a bit of a struggle but it worked out in the end. I’ve got what I needed to get into university and it’s nice to have actually completed this and done it fairly well. It’s a nice sense of accomplishment to have worked for something and got it. Oddly the B means more than the A just because it took much more work to get (honestly, if you’re bored next year sign yourself up for Higher Computing and turn up for the exam. If you managed to use a web browser to get to this blog then you should get a C, minimum!).

So now I’ve got four years of uni. Four years! Well, at least I don’t have to sit on a bus for 45 minutes to get there…