While relevant, xdissent's post[1] is dead banned. He wrote:

Or install MS VMs for IE7, 8 & 9 with one command: https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

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[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2913557

If you have a mac and are unsure on how... (not sure why any mac-owner wouldn't be comfortable with the terminal window but,) Instructions to use xdissent's ievms script from github:

1) Install virtual box - http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads - Go with the "VirtualBox 4.1.2 for OS X hosts x86/amd64" option.

2) Copy the command that is most relevant from you from here: https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/blob/master/README.rst (starting with 'curl')

3) Open up your terminal window paste, hit the 'enter' key

4) Hit the town, it can take some time, depending on your connection speed that is.

Does this work for linux users, specifically ubuntu?

Yes. I couldn't get the IE6 disk to work but IE8/Windows 7 works nicely. Note that you shouldn't need cabextract but you may have to install p7zip-rar to extract the exe/rar files.

Haven't tried that. Looks like it would.

Care to explain? I've no idea what you're talking about.

xdissent:

> I made a comment a while back that a few people considered rude, so my karma got knocked down to -40 in one thread. Now the vast majority of users will never see my comments, depending on their settings.

And they also can't reply directly to his comments.

Is it possible to vote people back out of this hole? Or is it a permanent thing?

I think you can, but in this case, he only has three upvotable posts, which, at his current score (36) would require 12 people to get him back to 0...

Go to your user page and enable showdead to see comments that have been killed.

Some people may have been shadowbanned without realising it

Note: Takes up 30gb+

And you are asked for a valid windows key on first run.

While not free, another option that will take up significantly less space is installing VMWare with Windows 7, then then installing IETester. This is also nice because you only have to run one virtual machine "allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE10 preview, IE9, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process."

http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

"...this is an alpha release..." Not exactly what you want to hear when you're testing... I already have enough problems trying to run an actual version of IE6 on Virtualbox

IETester has been in alpha forever. Not sure if it's because of lack of commitment from the developer or what, but it's very buggy and always has been.

I've run into some odd quirks with IETester and similar tools where they don't run exactly like their actual brethren. It's probably fine for the 95% case, but that other 5% can be infuriating. It usually manifests itself as the page working fine in IETester and your customer being adamant it's broken in IE 8 (or whatever).

A little twist on that I use is setting up three XP IE6 machines and upgrading IE to 7 and 8 in two of them (for IE9 you still need Windows 7). Takes up significantly less disk space and RAM; the downside is you have to repeat the procedure every few months.

Note: you need to duplicate the vhd files using VBoxManage, since straight file copies share UUID and you will not be able to add them in VirtualBox):

VBoxManage clonehd in.vhd out.vhd

I did something similar to this a while ago, but I had issues because the UUIDs of the disk images were all the same, so VirtualBox couldn't recognise all of them at once.

Not sure if Microsoft's fixed that yet, but if not the magic words to change a disk image are: VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid

Why not run IETester on just a normal 7 VM?

cabextract is also available on homebrew:

brew install cabextract