Tip of the Week : Don’t install IE on Ubuntu 8.04

Its been a while since I’ve had anything to write about, and this isn’t much of a tip. But still. Everyone has had to test their site in different web browsers, everyone likely to read this anyway. Its a pain in the arse as we all know. What is worse, is trying to get IE running on Ubuntu without crashing everything and chewing through all your cpu. There is a better way.

Whats the problem with IE on Ubuntu?
I tried a number of methods for installing IE - over Wine which I couldn’t get to work, then with the IEs4Linux project, which worked but was very temperamental. Most times it would load, then start chewing through CPU quite badly.

Then after a while of testing I would close it down, only to have the wineserver process continue running and continuing to use all the cpu. It wasn’t always easy to kill this process either. If you do get into this situation and you’re still a bit of a Linux noob like me try something like:

ps aux | grep wine

to find the process id and then:

kill -KILL [pid]

What is the easier way?
The problem with trying to install all these browsers on your one laptop is it takes a lot of time, and doesn’t always run well. The solution was really simple: run ifconfig eth0 to find out your IP address on the local network then borrow a laptop with IE or Safari running and simply test by viewing the sites on your laptop.

Yeah, its stupidly obvious. Not much of a tip. Tip of the week material? Well I don’t have any other tips right now