
Automate download, install, config of IE-only VM's with VirtualBox (Linux/OSX) - donohoe
https://github.com/xdissent/ievms#readme
======
pygy_
A small meta-comment:

xdissent[1], the author of this package, is a HN user, but he has negative
karma because his fourth comment was snarky and got heavily downvoted. Even
though he's aware of the ban he clings to this handle and continues to post
messages seen by almost no one (he posted twice on this comment page [2,3]).
The rest of the messages eversince the incident have been fine (enable
"showdead" in the user control pannel if you want to read them).

Since he seems attached to the handle, it would be nice if he could be upvoted
back to the positive side so that he can once again participate.

He's got three upvotable posts in history (before the ban). His karma is
currently at -32. This means that he needs 11 brave souls to break even. You
know what to do :).

1\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xdissent>, comments:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xdissent>

2\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955430>

3\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955411>

.

Edit: 58 minutes later: -10. Thanks to the upvoters.

~~~
pygy_
xdissent: you appear to be still banned (at least, 4 hours after my post, you
still were). Since you now have a positive karma, could you answer this post
as a test?

~~~
xdissent
Testing 1 2 3. This thing on?

~~~
pygy_
Now it is :-)

You may want to repost your earlier answers in this thread.

    
    
        2011/9/3 Paul Graham <pg@ycombinator.com>
        >
        > fixed
        >
        > 2011/9/3 Pierre-Yves Gérardy <pygy79@gmail.com>:
        > > Hello,
        > > would it be possible to unban xdissent?
        > > See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955023 for the details.
        > > Kind regards,
        > > -- Pierre-Yves

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

Bad trend in the open-source community. Please don't ask your users to install
stuff this way. Not that _you_ can't be trusted, it leads to people dropping
their guard.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I kind of view bash piping as the worlds easiest install package.

Unequivocally, it is dangerous to run random pieces of code from the internet,
it just seems odd to me that if this same code was in a nice packaged install
wizard nobody would say anything about it.

~~~
wahnfrieden
Maybe it should include a first step of piping it to less for review, followed
by piping to bash if it looks fine. Slightly better...

~~~
Groxx
At which point the people who know how to read it will do so (I did, out of
curiosity) because it's so easy, and the people who don't will get

    
    
      jargonjargon [*&*@![]2\3
      if [[jargon -f "words!"]]
        jargon # jargon jargon
        jargon /&$_)(82
      fi # jargon the jargon
      jar(){
        gon                           # yay pictures!        #
        ∑´∞§∞¶•ø¨ˆ∆£˜¡–ª¢ø•ª¶π™˜£º¥µ # <(^.^)>              #
        ˚∆∂¥•¡º™ª•¶ƒ˙¨ˆ               #                      #
        ˙π¡˜ø£•¶√≠˚•™µº–£¨≤           # <= ˚∆˚! but it works #
      }
    

and just go to the next step.

~~~
joshu
Did you just come up with that? Hilarious

------
brianjolney
from the github wiki:

Rough VM size estimates:

IE7: 13GB IE8: 8.4GB IE9: 13GB Currently, the script will leave the compressed
RAR files in place, which means you're looking at something like 45 freaking
GB if you don't prune them manually (in ~/.ievms/vhd/). This wasn't a big deal
for me on my company workstation, but kinda sucks on my Macbook Air, so I'll
be adding a cleanup option shortly. You probably don't need to keep the
compressed files around anyway since we take a snapshot like you mentioned.

~~~
aninteger
I know you aren't the creator of those VMs but, any idea why they are so big?

What's weird is that there's a jump from 8.4 GB to 13 GB on Windows 7. What is
on the IE9 vhd that isn't on the IE8 vhd?

Edit: Nevermind, from the official link the IE9 vm comes with additional
tools.

~~~
pointyhat
On Win7, the jump is due to WinSxS. Every DLL several times and several
versions. DLL hell solved.

~~~
MarkSweep
DLL hell solved indeed. How many versions do you keep?

For what it's worth, the DLLs in System32 are projected out of WinSxS with
hardlinks, so they should not take up extra space. You still have the multiple
version thing, however that can be somewhat mitigated by making service packs
permanent[1].

[1] [http://blogs.technet.com/b/joscon/archive/2011/02/15/how-
to-...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/joscon/archive/2011/02/15/how-to-reclaim-
space-after-applying-service-pack-1.aspx)

~~~
pointyhat
That quantity of hard links takes up quite a bit of space though!

------
Maci
Alternatively: <http://utilu.com/IECollection/>

IE 1.0 to IE 8.0 as standalone versions in a single installer.

~~~
tadfisher
IE 7 and 8 are not available in the installer; I'm running Win7 x64 with IE
9.0 installed. Falling back to XP Mode for now.

~~~
killion
So if you go to Tools > Developer Tools the browser modes for IE 7 and 8 are
not there?

~~~
mootothemax
The IE7/IE8 compatibility modes are notoriously unreliable, e.g.:

 _Most importantly, why does my page not work in IE7, even though it works in
IE7 mode in IE9?_

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5993222/why-does-my-
page-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5993222/why-does-my-page-work-in-
ie9s-ie7-mode-but-not-in-ie7-itself)

 _IE9’s emulation of older IE document modes makes this easier but those
emulations are not exact._

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/04/testing-
multip...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/04/testing-multiple-
versions-of-ie-on-one-pc.aspx)

------
thristian
I have, on occasion, wanted to write almost exactly this script - but the
thing that stopped me was that VirtualPC apparently emulates a slightly
different IDE controller than VirtualBox, and so when Windows XP starts up in
the new VM, it doesn't have a driver installed for the IDE controller, can't
find its own hard-drive, and blue-screens. It's possible to edit the registry
to install the required driver, but that requires booting into Windows... a
Catch-22 if ever there was one.

I was eager to see how the problem had been solved... but apparently Windows
Vista and Windows 7 don't have that particular problem, and the IE6 VM (with
Windows XP) just says "IE6 support is currently disabled".

That's kind of sad; at least for the light web-development I've done, IE7 and
IE8 aren't nearly as fussy and hair-pulling as IE6.

------
aninteger
Adding the link to download the VMs directly from Microsoft:

<http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575>

------
fierarul
I can't believe Microsoft is giving away free Windows licenses as long as you
use the vm image for IE.

Which is basically the only reason I do have an old Windows XP vm on my Mac.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
You can't get the VMs to pass WGA so they are only good for 30 days before
they have to be reset; which pretty much makes them only good for testing / qa
purposes.

This seems like a very reasonable decision on Microsoft's part: they make it
easier / legal / quick to test on their platform and more people will support
and develop on it.

~~~
fierarul
I dunno, it could be useful for a number of things.

For example, I know a few online banking solutions that are IE-only. The most
you need there might be a certificate, so resetting the vm every 30 days isn't
such a big deal.

I try to keep the VMs as small as possible anyhow and if you need data, you
keep it in a VM shared folder that you map in the Windows guest.

~~~
sjs
Don't worry I'm sure some bean counter crunched the numbers and they decided
it was an acceptable risk.

I mean, if you want a fully functional pirated version that doesn't expire
every 30 days and you never have to activate you don't exactly have to look
very hard, or far.

------
wiredfool
Is there a way to make this work with KVM, or is this using something special
from the virtualbox distrubution to convert the .vhds?

~~~
sciurus
qemu-img can convert the VirtualPC (VHD) image format.

For example, qemu-img convert -O qcow2 Win7_IE8.vhd Win7_IE8.qcow2

------
ck2
Why not use IEtester and run all versions of IE on a vista/w7 free vmware
player install?

W7 trial iso will work without a key, it will just shutdown every 30 minutes
which is fine for testing purposes.

IEtester also has debugbar which sometimes is even better than some firefox
tools I use.

~~~
idrinkmusic
As far as I'm concerned, IE Tester doesn't have an exact copy of IE's code,
hence not 100% reliable.

~~~
jarofgreen
+1 IETester better than nothing and a decent fallback, but running the actual
IE's better than IETEster.

------
ajtaylor
Only last week I downloaded the IE9 VM's mentioned here, but got the never
ending BSOD-reboot loop when trying to use them in VirtualBox. This is going
to make my day when I get back in the office next week!

------
RexRollman
Personally speaking, I would love to see Google release an offical,
downloadable ChromeOS images that could be used with VMWare or Virtualbox.
Something like that could be a real boon for some users.

~~~
fierarul
The magic in ChromeOS is the hardware Google uses from the Chromebooks. There
is an unofficial site with images for Chromium(?)OS but it doesn't look
pretty.

~~~
rdl
What is the magic beyond SSD (and good acpi/power management integration),
trusted boot (using a TPM), and OpenGL?

~~~
fierarul
Beyond that I hope they have some better fonts on the Chromebooks.

I can't imagine what would one do with a ChromeOS VM when you have native
Chrome builds available. Once the novelty factor wears out (and it does,
pretty quickly), there is nothing to be done except delete the vm.

Otoh, I see the value in a secure device like the Chromebook and I think this
is what ChromeOS is selling, not just the actual OS.

------
speg
How do you get away with saying: "With a single command, you can have IE6,
IE7, IE8 and IE9 running in separate virtual machines." - when in the first
paragraph it says IE6 is not supported.

------
arb99
3 hours later (slow internet) and got all 3 working perfectly on OS X (snow
leopard).

------
hotice
Is it legal?

~~~
Groxx
The images and everything Microsofty are provided by Microsoft for this use.
VirtualBox is open source and ideal for something like this.

The _automation_ might be mired in some obscure clause on either end, but it's
just doing things you can legally do by hand.

~~~
hotice
Thanks!

