How to view Platinum Archive from Linux (Ubuntu)

[debsmouth]

As we know. the platinum archive downloads are not available to chrome or firefox, and internet explorer does not run on linux.

This is a cheat sheet to allow ubuntu users to run internet explorer, and therefore to download from the Platinum Archive.

If, like me, running IE6/7/8/9 under wine still doesn't allow the archive to work, you can actually run a full Windows 7 virtual machine under linux with IE9 installed, without needing to buy a copy of windows, the image is a bona fide Microsoft image provided for developers to test website compatibility with IE. This is all completely legal and free, all you need is 21Gb of free space (5Gb for the download, and 5Gb to extract it, and then around 11Gb for the image to be built), and an hour or two of downloading time, depending on your network speed.

First install the virtual machine software (VirtualBox from Oracle):

echo "deb http://download dot virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -sc) contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list
wget -q http://download dot virtualbox.org/v...racle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.2

Then install curl and unar (you may already have these), and use them to download the Microsoft Image with IE9 installed (you can substitute "9" with "8" or "7" if you prefer earlier versions):

sudo apt-get install curl unar
curl -s https://raw dot github.com/xdissent/...aster/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="9" bash

xdissident is a site where someone has kindly written install scripts for linux for the virtual images provided by Microsoft. This download takes a while - the zip is 5Gb. Once downloaded the install script should automatically unzip the file (which was why you installed unar), and create the virtual image ("IE9 - Win7-disk1"). This takes a few minutes.

Once the files are extracted and executed, you can delete the install files to get some space back:

rm ~/.ievms/vhd/*.zip

Thats it, once installed, open VirtualBox from the system menu, and there will be a machine caled IE9-Win7, start this (password is "Password1"), and the archive is suddenly accessible (as indeed are many sites specifically needing internet explorer!). You may need to go into the settings and disable Hardware Acceleration (Settings -> System -> Acceleration and untick "Enable VT-x/AMD-V"). You may also need to set the number of CPUs to 1.

Downloaded files will be saved onto the virtual windows desktop, but if you want to share a folder on linux you can install the guest additions add-on (in the Virtual Box menu - Devices -> Install Guest Additions).

I got a lot of this from the very helpful site http://www dot webupd8.org/2011/09/t...lorer-9-8.html and with a bit of playing.

Hope it helps!
Thanks but hotlinks are not allowed replaced . with word dot for any one wishing to use this
Buster

[ernie2003]

Thanks for the great tip. I'm sure this will be of great help to the members here.

[gloryholeprincess]

...This is a cheat sheet to allow ubuntu users to run internet explorer, and therefore to download from the Platinum Archive....

I will let my man's grandmother know about this thread! lol lol
It was such a problem for her (at 86) to use Ubuntu that we went out and bought her a different regular PC.

This is an awesome thread though and for that...Rep!
Piper