It`s now a week since I have my brand new MacBook Pro, and despite the fact that I`m absolutely happy with it, I tamper it with Installations of various kinds. So, one of the things I – as a spare time webdesigner – had to try was installing the dirty old Internet Explorer 6 through wine. I first did a test install with the 60-day trial of CrossOver Mac, a commercial wine-implementation, and this went just fine. If I could do that myself using wine, I`d get the same, but for free; so read on.
Easiest way to do this was most probably (besides buying CrossOver Mac) through Darwine and the great ies4linux – project, with which I succeeded installing IE 6 and IE 7 (sic!) on Ubuntu. But using Darwine and Mac OS X, the IE would not run. Searching for solutions, I found a thread discussing this subject over at arstechnica, which suggested compiling the latest version of wine from source. Very well, I started and indeed succeeded! Here`s the summary, quite straight after Roner`s guide on arstechnica (thank you m8!):

Basic installations

• Install DarwinPorts if you not already have it. If you do, maybe run a sudo port -d selfupdate to get the latest and greatest.
• Install the following packages using DarwinPorts: cabextract, wget, freetype, coreutils, fontforge.

Compile wine

• Get the latest wine-source (which is 0.9.25 as of Nov 11th 2006) from sourceforge and unarchive it; easiest is doubleclicking it in the Finder. ;)
• Launch X11 and open an Xterm (should open automatically); use this shell to compile wine!
(That`s because of the OpenGL-headers which aren`t present from Terminal.app).
• Time to configure wine:
$ cd path/to/wine-0.9.xx $ ./configure
Watch out for any errors. If there are any, try to eliminate them by installing the appropriate packages using DarwinPorts
• If you`re set, run the two "make" commands the terminal tells you at the last lines. If that runs well, too, then do it: sudo make install
(You may keep the wine-directory to issue a "sudo make uninstall" later if you want to get rid of wine)

Checks and settings

• Make sure your $PATH-variable contains the needed paths by adding the following to your ~/.profile file (if it`s not already set like that):
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH
X11 also needs to know these paths, but it doesn`t read your .profile but .bashrc instead. So let`s copy our readjusted .profile: cp ~/.profile ~/.bashrc
• Now we need to symlink the recently installed freetype-libraries to /usr/local/lib:
$ ln -s /opt/local/lib/libfreetype* /usr/local/lib/
(Mine were already installed since I built GD a week earlier, so I did skip this step)
• check if your $DISPLAY is set: type echo $DISPLAY from an X11 Xterm. If it is anything but ":0.0", then type export DISPLAY=:0.0. Quit X11 afterwards.

Install ies4linux

• Very good so far; now let`s fetch the latest ies4linux-package (I used 2.1 beta 3); I got mine from here. Unarchive it and cd to it using the normal Terminal.app
• Launch the guided ies4linux-installation: ./ies4linux --beta-install-ie7
Answer the questions (I did not install the version 5 IEs, but used the default answer for the residual questions)
(Note: Installation of IE 7 failed for me and I had to cancel the process using CTRL + C; maybe someone else has more luck. However, this did not affect IE 6)
(Note 2: As gnosis points out at the ars-forum, this is due to a 'bug' in the copying mechanism, which can lead to loss of empty disk space! I suggest not using the --beta-install-ie7 ATM, although nothing happened to me.)
• If you`re done, launch X11 again, open an Xterm and launch your IE through bin/ie6. There appear some worrying messages, but as long as the IE launches afterwards, everything is fine.

This is where I already was totally happy. However, the fonts looked quite strange, most probably they were missing since we haven`t installed Windows itself, luckily. =) However, CrossOver Mac has those fonts since their IE uses the right fonts, so copy them over from the CrossOver-Installation: If you indeed have Windows installed on another partition, you can instead symlink those fonts after erasing the fonts supplied by ies4linux:
That is it. Remember all the IE-stuff is (by default) installed to ~/.ies4linux/. All this is perfect for testing websites, now there`s not one single reason I need Windows itself. Thanks again to all the contributors in the arstechnica-forum, especially 'Roner'; thank you!

Update Nov 29, 2007
Since a few days, ies4linux 2.99.0 is available, which has been improved quite a lot for users on the Mac, thanks to Mike Kronenberg. Download this new version and all you need to do is doubleclick the ies4linux-script. The trick with the fonts is still a good one, but all the fuss before actually running ies4linux can now be forgotten. :-)
Since ies4linux (well, ies4mac actually) now install themselves to ~/Applications/IEs 4 Mac/.ies4mac, the code to copy the fonts is slightly different:
What's even better news: To start an IE, just doubleclick the executable!