Unfortunately for us, that means our VMs will lock us out after 30 days of unactivated use. The VMs provided by Microsoft will not pass the Windows Genuine Advantage and cannot be activated. Anything can go wrong in Windows and rather than having to worry about maintaining a stable VM, you can simply revert to the clean snapshot to reset your VM to the initial state. Obviously, this tool is aimed at web developers, but if you don’t care about testing in Internet Explorer and you simply need a working Windows VM, you could just install a single VM running Windows Vista + IE9 using this command (after installing VirtualBox, of course): # enter this in Terminal.app after installing VirtualBoxĪ snapshot is automatically taken upon install, allowing rollback to the pristine virtual environment configuration. With a single command, you can have IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9 running in separate virtual machines. The so-called ievms scripts aim to facilitate that process using VirtualBox on Linux or OS X. Unfortunately, setting these virtual machines up without Microsoft's VirtualPC can be extremely difficult. Microsoft provides virtual machine disk images to facilitate website testing in multiple versions of IE, regardless of the host operating system.
