IEs4Linux 2.5 Beta 3 and happy new year
Quick update: Many people reported problems with tempfile, so here is the fix with mktemp. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks to everybody that commented about it. Download IEs4Linux beta 4 now.
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Hi everybody! Here is IEs4Linux beta 3 IEs4Linux 2.5 beta 4, with some improvements. And I changed how you run ies4linux again – that’s why we call these releases ‘beta’, don’t we? 
Well, I think having two executables is too complicate (2.5beta1 introduced ./installer, remember?). Well, now we have only ./ies4linux again, much more simpler. Execute it and it will show you an user interface. Want command-line installer? Run ./ies4linux –no-gui (so, you still can embed IEs4Linux wherever you want, or run it really automatically). KISS.
2.5 Beta3 changelog:
- Only one executable again
- Riched patch back again (this fix the annoying blank popup bug – Hebrew users, see if this fix your problems)
- Fixed (finally) ActiveX security issue
- Download function improved to get broken downloads
- Portable getFileSize in bytes – thanks to Raven Morris
- It seems that black gifs are gone on IE7 (anyone can confirm?)
- Temporary files are obtained using
tempfilemktemp/tempfile to avoid permission issues - New debug mode when running ie executables
I was thinking a lot these days about IEs4Linux complexity… These day we have all that KISS thing, Getting Real, “Less is more”, the 80/20 percent principle and many more. So I was thinking: is IEs4Linux too complex? All that options on our installer… (who knows me since our 1.x release know how much I hate installers… ‘Next’ -> ‘Next’ -> ‘Finish’… bah!)
That’s my point: how many people use those advanced options? (changing default folder, download folder, wget flags??) And who knows how to configure WGET is an advanced user, right? So, he can use –wget-flags when running ies4linux and we can remove that option from our installer. The option will still be there, but not visible for everyone: we clean our user interface and advanced users are still happy.
So, the question is: should I remove advanced options from user interface and provide that options only as command-line options? (my answer today: Yes. But I want to hear you
By the way, this version still have the same UI, with all advanced options.
And I need your help with this technical question:How can we install icons on Gnome/Kde menu? (not only to Desktop) – many people want this
Special thanks to translators: Fabio, Jorge Miró, Taras Chuhay, Lahtis, Robo Design, Weirdo, Helge, Marco and けんけん.
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Happy new year for everybody! I promise big things for 2007 on IEs4Linux project, and also big things on other projects I’m working now related to IEs4Linux. Just wait
I’m getting the following error:
[....]
Installing IE 6
Initializing
Creating Wine Prefix
Extracting CAB files
/home/username/temp/ies4linux-2.5beta3/lib/install.sh: line 2: tempfile: command not found
/home/username/temp/ies4linux-2.5beta3/lib/install.sh: line 7: $logfile: ambiguous redirect
cat: : No such file or directory
An error occured when trying to cabextract some files.
Using the ies4linux-2.0.5 worked without problem.
Hi, the installation failed here because “tempfile” command doesn’t exists (Mandriva 2007). Once the two occurences were replace by “mktemp”, all went fine
I beleive mktemp is much more usual, so it probably worth the switch?
Hi,
If you remove those options, please give a hint that there are advanced options available.
Alternatively, you could add a Tab / separate page called “advanced options / expert options” which does not disturb the normal user.
I’m using opensuse 10.1. I don’t have the tempfile command, i have done the installation with a simbolic link to mktemp in $HOME/bin
ln -s /bin/mktemp $HOME/bin/tempfile
Ie7 crash when I push the stop button while loads the start page (I need configure a proxy)
I’m having the following problem when I try to access “Internet Options” in IE7. An error message is displayed stating “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.”. Is there any way around this (it’s needed to set the proxy server)?
A better fix for the tempfile error mentioned above is probably:
sed “s|tempfile|mktemp|” -i ui/kommander.sh lib/functions.sh
Hello!
Personally, i don’t think you should remove the advanced options. This installer is not made for simple users, anyway
. It’s made for expert web programmers (and designers) who want to switch to Linux, yet they still need to check tehir sites in IE. Such “users” are not “scared” by lots of options – actually I enjoy configuration options. If I don’t see those options in the GUI, I probably don’t know it’s possible to configure what I want.
As for the translation: you are welcome. I’ve tried to make it much better than the previous one: I have properly translated all strings, and I included diacritics. I really liked the “million thanks” Flash animation. Funny! LOL
.
Good luck and keep up this great work!
Howdie,
I just installed Beta 3 and everything ran extremely smoothly and the GUI is designed very nice also (no changes required I think… maybe remove the wget).
The only problem that I seem to have is that the flash at websites is actually really flashing (blinking white whenever a movement happen), luckily I’m not a designer so I don’t really care
Beside that I had a little problem with this site actually, I was directed to this page from another site and I went through the Home link to understand more, from the Home page I saw installation and then Ubuntu, now as a newbie like me at Linux I went for that page at once and installed it.
After few minutes I realized that I didn’t install the newest version after all (though the file was partially named “latest”) so I wanted to remove it and install the new version.. again as a newbie I didn’t really find it easily to do so, just after checking the forum I saw how easily it is to be done.
But really those “bad points” that I say aren’t bad at all! all of that “troubles” took me less then 20 minutes and with this new option to run IE on Ubuntu I don’t have any need for Windows!!
Thanks a lot!!
I would suggest doing it the normal way – a quick simple setup with default options, with an ‘advanced options’ button for advanced users.
> How can we install icons on Gnome/Kde menu? (not only to Desktop)
These Xdg-utils scripts from Freedesktop.org should do the trick for installing menu items on any desktop that supports Portland! (ie: GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc.)
Hope this helps!
Jonathan Evraire
hi sergio,
i really love your installation script.
to be able to use IE under linux just to check how a website looks
rendered by IE is great!
regarding IE7:
HTTP authentication seems not to work.
meanwhile i will keep IE6 and look periodically if you got it fixed
thanks for all,
gf
The one comment I have is that I would like to see a browser detection script added to your “congratulations” page so the first thing I see is a confirmation that I’m running the browser your script just said it installed.
XDG and Portland is the way to go. First modify the four .desktop files so that they read, for example:
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Exec=${BIN_PATH}/ie6
Icon=${ICON_PATH}/ies4linux.svg
Name=Internet Explorer 6.0 Web Browser
GenericName=Web Browser
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
Encoding=UTF-8
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Network;
Obviously, change the ${BIN_PATH} and ${ICON_PATH} to suit your installation. For my desktop install here, I use
Exec=/home/andrewc/bin/ie55
Icon=/home/andrewc/.ies4linux/ies4linux.svg
if you’re installing the icons centrally, use whichever /usr/local -type path you chose during the install. The “Categories=” setting is necessary to make the icons appear in the “Applications > Internet” menu in GNOME. Any KDE folks want to weigh in with some good settings for that environment? What about MIME types: should we advertise the fact that IE can just about manage text/html and image/png? ^^
I also changed the GenericName to “Web Browser” and tacked the same string onto the Name so it’s like firefox 2.0 under Ubuntu edgy. Desktop files are localised on the fly in GNOME, so what about something like:
Name=Internet Explorer 6.0 Web Browser
Name[pt_BR]=Navegador Web IE6.0
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
Comment[pt_BR]=Navegue na Internet
GenericName=Web Browser
GenericName[pt_BR]=Navegador Web
and so on. Copying and modifying the Ubuntu Firefox one should get good results.
For an ordinary user, copy the modified .desktop files into what I think is the normal user-level area for these things, creating it first if it doesn’t exist, and run update-desktop-database with some suitable environment variables set.
XDG_DATA_DIRS=”$HOME/.local/share”
XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=”$XDG_DATA_DIRS”
export XDG_DATA_DIRS XDG_CONFIG_DIRS
mkdir -p “$XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications”
cp -a “${THE_PATH_TO}/IE5.0.desktop” “${XDG_DATA_DIRS}/applications/”
cp -a “${THE_PATH_TO}/IE5.5.desktop” “${XDG_DATA_DIRS}/applications/”
cp -a “${THE_PATH_TO}/IE6.0.desktop” “${XDG_DATA_DIRS}/applications/”
update-desktop-database
Should make the icons appear immediately in the main GNOME menu. You’d probably best check that what I’ve described is good Portland/XDG practice first though: I know it works for me under Ubuntu Edgy ^^
All that you need to do to an ies4linux-2.0.5 -generated .desktop file to make it play properly with GNOME is to add the
Categories=Application;Network;
line (and run update-desktop-database in the right way, of course). Everything else I described above just makes it look neater.
Will the real IE7 interface with tabs be available soon? Thanks.
My thoughts on the UI run along these lines:
First present a dialog that says, briefly, what the program does, and has three buttons: one for a quick/express/typical install, one for a Custom Install, and Cancel. If the user clicks Cancel, the program terminates.
If the user clicks the quick install button, all advanced options (ideally, _all_ the options) are set to sensible defaults and/or autodetected, and the next thing shown is a progress bar. When the progress bar completes, a message appears saying it’s done and your IEs are installed, with an Okay button.
If the user clicks the Custom Install button, you give them a big fat dialog box full of choices.
I don’t particularly mind having the defaults on a separate tab, as you do now, out of main sight. However, I also like most of Nathan’s ideas, including the program statement purpose and three buttons in the first page. I personally prefer seeing a Section Header display, as you do now, to a progress bar, but I like details. If the user clicks “Custom”, I would use the current UI – common options on the first tab, rarely needed on the second. And it’s time that installing ie7 became one of those advanced options, with a pre-Alpha warning. I don’t care one way of the other about the wget flags – I never used it.
I don’t mind the ‘–help’ display either. However, one way to organize that is common options get displayed with ‘–help’, with an additional line for ‘–help-full’, and the full help menu gets displayed with ‘–help-full’.
Oh, and only one executable is much better.
> It seems that black gifs are gone on IE7 (anyone can confirm?)
It does, but just sometimes. Seems when the Gif is saved with transparency it’s still black.
The new installer works well on kubuntu 6.10. double clicking on ies4linux icon in konqueror 3.5.5 opens the gui that works properly.
The only thing that does not appear to work properly is the beta installation of MS IE 7. It does not work from the gui (no option available). it does not work from the command line (if you give the option –beta-install-ie7 the system restarts the whole installation from scratch).
Apart this little problem, this beta is great. Thanks and compliments!
Hi
Thanks for this great app.
I tried it out for the IE 7 version (I already had the 3 others)
some problems:
I run my desktop in /home/user/ and not in /home/user/Desktop so the startup icons aren’t installed
Can you create different icons for the different versions? just adding a number on the icon will do
It reinstalled IE 6 although it was already installed (sorry, I don’t remember with which version)
Another point:
I was running another wine app while installing. But I noticed after installing (and after running some IE’s) that this app wasnt updating his screen anymore (soI have killed it).
I have wine 0.9.28 installed from the official wine ubuntu repository
The installer in beta4 is not working if the locale is set to C or POSIX. I think they should be treated like en_US. “error” should be used instead of “return” on line 70.
The GUI installer doesn’t show text properly in non-UTF8 locales, such as ru_RU.KOI8-R and fr_FR.ISO8859-1.
You should add this to the installation steps, if users get a GPG error:
wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O – | sudo apt-key add -
That’s for ubuntu at least, so you’ll have to customize it for other distros.
OK, the problem with GUI under non-UTF8 locales is that Python always expects UTF-8 encoding. The iconv trick in ies4linux script is unneeded if GUI is to be run. If non-UTF8 translation files are to be supported (there are none at the moment), please add “-f utf8″ to the iconv command line for the GUI installer. Or maybe the Python installer should read and interpret the language file on its own, so that the Python installer can be run as a standalone application.
Sergio,
Thanks for all your great work. ies4linux has been extremely useful.
When installing IEs 6 and 7 using beta4 on FC6, I encountered the following errors:
swflash.cab ./lib/install.sh: line 8: [: =: unary operator expected
./lib/install.sh: line 11: [: =: unary operator expected
./lib/install.sh: line 14: [: =: unary operator expected
swflash.cab 100%
The transparent GIF issue in IE7 seems to have been corrected (since beta2).
As others have reported, the ie7 internet options dialog remains unavailable
the ‘About Internet Explorer’ dialog for ie7 fails similarly.
Under beta2, I found I was able to install and use the ‘IE Developer Toolbar’ and got hooked on that set of tools. At that time, the toolbar was also at beta2. Beta3 of the IE Developer Toolbar no longer integrates into the interface properly. I imagine this is more due to changes to the toolbar than to ies4linux, but it’s an extremely useful toolbar and a perfect companion to ies4linux. For those who haven’t discovered this toolbar, it’s available from Microsoft here.
Thanks again for all the great work!
– Colin
Hebrew bug fixed.
Thanks!
Good work! I just installed IEs4Linux 2.5 beta 4 and the black gif problem is there for me at least in IE7
1) ie7 problems:
Can’t find a site that displays black .gifs – anybody got a url?
“Internet options” still doesn’t come up.
Flash doesn’t work ( http://music.aol.com , http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/ ). Flash works fine in my non-ies4linux wine installs when winver = win2k or winxp.
ActiveX doesn’t work ( http://www.movielink.com , Aol videos ).
Security box for plugins doesn’t come up ( http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com doesn’t offer to update your windows update software before scanning for updates, Flash can’t be (re)installed from adobe). Probably a wine problem because when winver = win2k or winxp, ActiveX settings in the “internet Options” “security” tab have to be relaxed to get plugins installed.
“https:” links don’t work (registry? wine can’t handle https: when winver is win2k or winxp).
2) If anyone wants to uncomment the “Processing inf files” section, they will have to move the first line of that section, line 163 – mv *.inf “$BASEDIR/ie6/$DRIVEC/$WINDOWS/$INF/” – 11 lines up to just before ‘mv -f * “$BASEDIR/ie6/$DRIVEC/$WINDOWS/$SYSTEM/”‘
3) The kommander ui seems to be ignoring the columns specification of the ‘–vt_sz’ option to ‘konsole’ (last line of ies4linux-2.5beta4/ui/kommander.sh). This is on SuSE 10.2. Anyone else having this problem?
4) Unlike eeos, I had no problem using the ui when invoked with “ies4linux-2.5beta4/ies4linux –beta-install-ie7″.
Hi,
This is a nice installer. Made life rally easy. I do have 1 problem with the ie7 install however.
I have installed ies4linux-beta4 with the ie7 beta. Everything installs and works for ie5, 5.5 and 6. For some reason ie7 blanks the entire screen. I also tried the winecfg and it has the same effect of blanking the whole screen. The screen is still active however and if I click on where I think another window is then the screen reappears untill I click on the wine window again.
I am running wine 0.9.27. Problem only exists for the ie7 bottle.
Thanks for a nice installer.
Simon
Some answers:
- Yonatan: ies4linux-latest point to latest stable release. Maybe we should have an ies4linux-latest-beta link too. Also I know I should put something on home page about beta releases
- Jonathan: did you know if I can embed Xdg-utils into IEs4Linux? I mean Xdg-utils uses a MIT license and IEs4Linux is GPL… can we use Xdg-utils anyway?
- Myron: next IEs4Linux version will put IE version on IE title bar.
- Andre Ruiz: Maybe one day we have tabs on IE7 Linux. But today it’s impossible and it’s not a high priority issue.
- Nathan Eady: I liked progress bars too, but it is very difficult to add one right now because IEs4Linux is essentialy a bash program. Only GUI is written in different programming languages. And also, as Jim said, some details are good
- Jim: IE7 will be on beta 5 GUI, you win
Also I liked your suggestion for –help.
- Crash: do you have an url where black gifs still appears on ie7?
- Nathan Samson: Maybe Xdg-utils detects your Desktop location?
Every time you run IEs4Linux it installs everything again, ovewriting old installation.
- Pavel: good to know about python and utf8. Do you know something about kommander?
- Jim: I’ll relax security option for ActiveX again, but only for IE7.
slopes:
- http://www.google.de/intl/de/holidaylogos.html
- http://bilder.lubyte.de/ie7_and_gifs.png
Congratulations for your wonderful work!!
I installed ie6 and ie7 on Gentoo Linux.
I confirm the problems already posted by jim burns regards ie7:
- flash doesn’t work
- https doesn’t work
On ie6 everything works fine.
If you run
./ies4linux
in a terminal and both the python and kommander GUIs fail to start, then you end up with the help text, which is very confusing. Shouldn’t it just default to no gui if it can’t launch one?
./ies4linux –no-gui
works just fine.
I’m running kubuntu 6.10 BTW.
Crash – your Google link works fine for me, using wine 0.9.29. What version are you using?
I had Wine 0.9.23, now with 0.9.29 it does work. Cool!
Hi Sergio,
I can confirm that the Hebrew bug is fixed.
THANKS!
On the legal notice page of the wiki/information, I would like to humbly point out that instead of saying “you are breaking the law” (which may not be true in some jurisdictions), it might be more accurate to state something similar to “you are not in compliance with the EULA, which may or may not be illegal according to the laws where you live.”
Thanks for IEs4Linux!
Beta4 aborts on Mac OS X with the following error (be it from “standard” Bash or from inside X11 Bash):
——
Downloading everything we need
/Users/pp/Desktop/ies4linux-2.5beta4/lib/install.sh: line 28: [: 0 /Users/pp/.ies4linux/downloads/DCOM98.EXE: integer expression expected
DCOM98.EXE 100%
An error ocurred when downloading. Please run IEs4Linux again. Corrupted file: DCOM98.EXE
——
The file DCOM98.EXE is nowhere to be found, and the error pops up almost immediadetly after invoking the script. Beta1 (or Beta2) ran fine, I’m still using IE 6 from that installation. Any ideas?
That error – “Corrupted file:” – on the very first download attempted sounds like you are having problems with the new function getFileSize(). This starts at line 117 of your ies4linux-2.5beta4/lib/functions.sh. There you will find four different ways of calculating the file size, failing over from one to the other if your system doesn’t support the first command tried. Try commenting out each command block tried and running ies4linux again. Hopefully ies4linux will work before you get to the last command. If it doesn’t, try the ‘ls’ command block again, but with the ‘–block-size=1′ removed (in both places). If anything works, let us know.
Just to state the obvious, a line is commented out if you place a ‘#’ in column 1. So commenting out the first and second command blocks would look like this, except for the spacing:
# stat ‘-Lc’ ‘%s’ “$1″ 2> ‘/dev/null’ && return 0
# ls ‘–block-size=1′ ‘-l’ “$1″ &> ‘/dev/null’ &’
# return 0
# }
Well, once again this posting software is editing out text between “forbidden” punctuation marks, but you should get the idea.
Thank you for your help. No problem with the editing of your post, I know how to uncomment.
The last idea did the trick, I removed ‘-block-size=1′ in both places and it started the download. Now I get stuck at another place, I can’t find what the error tells me in “install.sh”:
—–
Installing IE 6
Initializing
Creating Wine Prefix
Extracting CAB files
/Users/pp/Desktop/ies4linux-2.5beta4/lib/install.sh: line 8: $logfile: ambiguous redirect
cat: : No such file or directory
An error occured when trying to cabextract some files.
—–
Well, line 8 wasn’t terribly informative – it’s a comment!
Basically, you are having a tmp file problem. ‘logfile’ is a variable in function extractCABS () in ies4linux-2.5beta4/lib/functions.sh, which invokes (is set by) function create_temp_file() on line 353, which first tries ‘mktemp’, then failing that, ‘tempfile’. Let us know if MAC OSX (what version?) is missing both of these commands. If not, comment out the line containing the command you don’t have. If you are missing both commands, comment out both lines, and hard code a filename here as a return value (’touch made-up-filename;echo made-up-filename’), and make sure you have permissions in the directory you create the file in. create_temp_file() is also a new function in beta4.
I found a website that still has the old hebrew websites empty window bug.
http://projects.ee.bgu.ac.il/