Using VMs

To test a webapplication under different operating systems, virtualisation is a nice way.
I would try to use Ubuntu Linux as host system together with VirtualBox and IE test images for VirtualPC made freely available by Microsoft.

Install VirtualBox

1. Use your favorite package manager to install virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-guest-utils. VirtualBox version 2.1.2 and higher is recommended, the network setup will be much more easier with versions above 2.1.2.

Download and prepare virtual disk images

The images provided by Microsoft can be found here. We will start with the image for IE6-XPSP3.

1. download the image IE6-XPSP3.exe
2. extract the self extracting exe. You can use wine to do this without Windows installed. Password and expiration info will be written to a file named ReadMe.txt
3. Add the extracted *.VHD image in VirtualBox by:
   1. choosing Menu: File-->Manage Virtual Media
   2. Add

1. create and configure a VM based on this image