As anyone who knows me probably knows already, I use Ubuntu and / or Debian Linux for all of my day to day computing now - and have done for almost three years - everything from word processing to presentations, web development and organising my campaign work on climate change, and it’s getting more user friendly every month.

One thing that’s always been a problem, specifically when working on website development, is the need to test them using Internet Explorer. For a long time I kept an old laptop to hand, running Windows 2000 for those moments when I needed to be 100% sure everything looked flawless in the browser we all love to hate.

Today I came across IEs For Linux and in a few minutes (most of which was download time) had IE 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 running under wine - something I’ve tried to do before and failed.

The actual program is extremely neat - a set of scripts that configures wine for you, and downloads the necessary Internet Explorer components from Microsoft, setting everything up smoothly with shortcuts on your desktop to each version of Internet Explorer. Until firefox buries IE six feet under and the scourge of web developers is gone for good, this will be very useful.

Oh, and they’re even working on IE 7.