Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#111

Post by scraplab » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 7:24 AM UTC

ja27 wrote: post #39

fowlerje wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. They have 10.8 VMs for VMWare Workstation. I'd recommend at least 8gb of RAM for smoother access though.

"They" being someone that posted an image on bittorrent? Apple doesn't license OS X for VMWare anywhere except Apple hardware. You can't even run a 10.8 guest on a 10.7 host per their license, which is really annoying.

VMWare ESXi (and Fusion too, I expect) runs legitimate installations, with no hacks required, as long as it's on Apple hardware. You need the InstallESD.img file from the OS installer.

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#112

Post by antman » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 7:41 AM UTC

xradionut wrote: post #31

blahpro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although they come from Microsoft, I don't feel enormously comfortable doing this: chmod +x LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx; ./LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx

I was assuming the built-in NSA access was making people uncomfortable. ;)

Welcome to the 8mil people club!

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#113

Post by Isofarro » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 7:54 AM UTC

novaleaf wrote: post #89

If you have access to a windows box, here's a better solution: Install IE10 and use the dev tools (F12). there you can set browser emulation to IE 7,8,9,10. doesn't include ie6, but not many people still use it: http://www.ie6countdown.com/

Don't do this for web development. The browser emulations are just that, emulations, and they fail to be perfect emulations.

Which means you are likely to be fixing rendering issues and buggy behaviour in the emulated version that don't exist on the real thing, and more importantly missing issues that are evident in the real browser but not on the emulation.

It's a cognitive dissonance, you are testing a browser stack your customers won't be using.

Virtual machines are practically a better solution, though it gets into slighty murky territory when there's a lot of JavaScript magic going on. At that point, nothing really beats a native browser running on native hardware.

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#114

Post by inthewind » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 7:59 AM UTC

marshray wrote: post #110

inthewind wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it say that? It reads 'Select Desired Testing OS', which is an odd phrase. It could read 'Select desired testing (host) OS'. But may aswell just read 'Select host OS', as you suggest. Seems to be a classic case of Microsoft changing terminology, and just confusing everyone further down the line in the process. You could spell out what a host OS is on a descriptive help text next to the form control. Also noticed…

Disclosure: I work at MSFT, though not on this. > It reads 'Select Desired Testing OS', which is an odd phrase. Right. I read that with the implied [for]. Even still, it's odd. My workflow is: I already have a host OS. I desire to download a VM image running an OS on which to test my site in IE. > Seems to be a classic case of Microsoft changing terminology, and just confusing everyone further down the line in the pr…

Cheers for the response.

I should have said 'Great to see some checksums!'.

(I looked high and low for checksums for my Windows 8 download, and what I did find didn't match what I had. Gives you a little piece of mind after a 7hour download, and a crashed OS!)

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#115

Post by marshray » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 8:09 AM UTC

inthewind wrote: post #114

marshray wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work at MSFT, though not on this. > It reads 'Select Desired Testing OS', which is an odd phrase. Right. I read that with the implied [for]. Even still, it's odd. My workflow is: I already have a host OS. I desire to download a VM image running an OS on which to test my site in IE. > Seems to be a classic case of Microsoft changing terminology, and just confusing everyone further down the line in the pr…

Cheers for the response. I should have said 'Great to see some checksums!'. (I looked high and low for checksums for my Windows 8 download, and what I did find didn't match what I had. Gives you a little piece of mind after a 7hour download, and a crashed OS!)

Definitely.

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#116

Post by mtdewcmu » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 8:25 AM UTC

runjake wrote: post #22

rednukleus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always impressed that Microsoft let you use Windows in a virtual machine on another platform at all (not all their competitors do). But then I realised that it made business sense for them.

Which competitors don't? The only competitor that comes to mind is Apple and they don't block this either -- though I believe they were the last holdout. Nor does Google, in any capacity, with Android or ChromeOS. Edit: I am dead wrong . Apple only permits the virtualization of OS X on Apple hardware, per the EULA. It does not permit the virtualization of OS X on non-Apple hardware. http://www.apple.com/legal/sla/doc…

It's possible to attempt using OSX on a PC through VMware, but I can attest to the fact that it works very poorly. We tried to do this at one of my jobs, and for development in Xcode, it was for all practical purposes unusable.

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#117

Post by crazystone » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 9:03 AM UTC

blahpro wrote: post #16

Tmmrn wrote: post #11

LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx LinuxVirtualBox.part2.rar LinuxVirtualBox.part3.rar LinuxVirtualBox.part4.rar LinuxVirtualBox.part5.rar Why? Why the proprietary rar format? I mean, is there any reason to actually use rar over even "only" xz nowadays or for big downloads, zpaq (lrzip is probably not mainstream enough I guess)? And 1000 megabyte parts? Why?

Although they come from Microsoft, I don't feel enormously comfortable doing this: chmod +x LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx; ./LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx

When I do as above. I got: "bash: ./IE8.WinXP.For.LinuxVirtualBox.sfx: No such file or directory" What can I do?

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#118

Post by masklinn » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 9:59 AM UTC

calebegg wrote: post #93

sdfjkl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea curl supported that kind of syntax. Neat.

It's actually bash syntax (the curly brace part): $ echo a{b,c}{d,e}

FWIW it's also available in zsh and ksh93.

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#119

Post by kyrias » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 11:23 AM UTC

Ecio78 wrote: post #40

MicroAndMacro wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Tmmrn. I work on the team that made these available. We originally had these as >3Gb single files and had many requests to reduce the file sizes from people who had failed transfers. It also helps when using sneaker net to setup test environments that are isolated and you need USB sticks to move bits around. We went with RAR because: * It's available on all platforms * No client or 3rd party software needed to ext…

My suggestion: use 7-zip Open Source, available on all the major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX). You can find also the MSI version that can be deployed via Active Directory GPO http://www.7-zip.org/download.html Oh, and you can create self-extracting file too (even though I don't know if you can unpack them on other platforms, never tried, but I should bet you can do it)

It's silly to recommend a program when complaining about a format. But yes it would be better if they used zip, which also happens to be integrated in Windows Explorer.

Re: Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

#120

Post by scrapcode » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 12:32 PM UTC

Is it me or does this design make your head spin in circles, too? Not really a relevant discussion of the topic at hand, but damn... This is one of the worst designs I've experienced in a while, in a brain-is-so-confused-my-eyes-are-crossing, kind of way.