Microsoft made available a download of a Virtual PC image of a stripped-down Windows XP install and IE6 (if you pass a Genuine Advantage check on your machine), allowing web developers to test sites against IE6 (which does not co-exist peacefully with IE7). I’ll avoid pointing out the obvious problems with their system, but thought the following might interest to people who develop on other platforms. Add:
- one Microsoft Virtual PC (free as in beer)
- one Win XP and IE6 virtual PC hard-drive image (not free, but zero dollars if you own Windows)
- one VMware Virtual Machine Importer 2 (free as in beer)
and you get a VMware server image of WinXP and IE6 that you can run under any OS supported by VMware, which is to say just about any.
Steps, to make it clear (this all happens on a Windows machine):
- Unpack the VPC image of WinXP and IE6.
- Install Virtual PC.
- When Virtual PC prompts you, create a new virtual machine; at the prompt for what storage to use, choose the “pre-existing hard drive” option and point VPC to the file you unpacked in the above step. This will create a .vpc file (typically in My Documents/My Virtual Machines).
- Run VMware Virtual Machine Importer and import the newly-created .vpc file from the previous step. In a few minutes, you’ll have a VMware machine image you can then use on any OS.
