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Free Official MSIE VM's for Linux and Mac

modern.ie

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

#61

Post by apalmblad »

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?

A while back (some time in the last year), they had a few of the files zipped up. There were a lot of support requests for help unzipping it. The files had a >4GiB file inside, requiring zip64 extensions. I remember at the time, my out of the box version of unzip on OS X did not support zip64 extensions - I think 6.0 is when support is added.

I'm not arguing for rar in particular, just commenting on the difficulties I saw and experienced when using the zip files they provided at one point.

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

#63

Post by inthewind »

Classic example of UX nightmare: So I follow the link, I see a button that says get free VMS. I click it. I then can't figure out what I'm meant to do. I stare at some weird quickstart offer. I give up. I come back to HN, and think - how come others have managed to download their images. I go back, I realise that the button just activates a dropdown/rollup (and it's already in the dropdown state, so clicking the button rolls it up!), and then finally I get to the VM images. To be honest, It would be easier to just have an apache directory index, with folders and a load of accompanying checksums. I got there in the end.

The other thing that I failed to notice, was that this was actually a Microsoft site! Why not hang off of their domain name? How am I supposed to know this is official?

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

#64

Post by rschmitty »

dave1010uk wrote: post #57

OK, now I've got a pretty solid IE test setup, how do I go about testing Mac browsers (eg Safari) without a Mac? AFAIK the Mac OS X license says it can't be virtualized under non-Mac hardware. It looks like the only options are to use remote testing services, buy Apple hardware or illegally use Mac on a non-Mac host.

Without a mac, you have no choice but something like BrowserStack

However, when you cave... I test OSX with VMWare following this guide:

http://www.souldevteam.net/blog/2013/03/22/os-x-mountain-lio...

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

#65

Post by rschmitty »

vizzah wrote: post #42

Do they expire? Previousy IE VMs from Microsoft were only valid for ~90 days or something and required re-downloading (and then re-configuring all settings which was pita).

Just take a snapshot of your VM after you have configured it the way you like. I do this with VMWare. When 90 days goes by, roll back to that snap shot.

take note of anything you upgraded since so you can create a new 90 day snapshot with more of the recent updates

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

#66

Post by MicroAndMacro »

vizzah wrote: post #42

Do they expire? Previousy IE VMs from Microsoft were only valid for ~90 days or something and required re-downloading (and then re-configuring all settings which was pita).

Hi vizzah. These are all Enterprise Evaluation versions of Windows for the most part and they all expire. We recommend you download once, take a snapshot BEFORE first use, then after 90 days revert to the snapshot. Not ideal I know as you still lose any changes you did to the image but saves you downloading again and configuring. Apologies for that bit of pain.

Follow @IEDevChat for updates and stuff.

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

#70

Post by tracker1 »

jsingleton wrote: post #10

I got the previous images the last time this site came up. Using Hyper-V that comes with Win 8 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper... to run them. Works a treat. VMWare workstation is also very good though.

I've been using VMWare Workstation for about a decade now... I've tried a few other VM platforms, and they've all not been quite as usable imho... I will say their support of ESXi updates, and pretty much dropping VMWare Server has been pretty bad.
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