How to install (or mock) Internet Explorer?

If you want to fake having it installed, try : winetricks

If this isn't working, I can't help you much, except to suggest installing with playonlinux and then replacing your wine prefix with the ie's prefix, but that would mean you have to reinstall everything.

Ivan, in the Wine HQ AppDB (http://appdb.winehq.org), there are entries for several versions of Internet Explorer. Have you tried them all with no success? Pay attention to the versions, it's not unusual that a newer Wine version breaks apps that worked in a previous one.

However, as I have never had the need for using IE under Wine (and never tried it), for the sake of easeness, I would expressly recommend you use PlayOnLinux you can

apt-get install playonlinux

So far, I had zero problems when installing games & apps through scripts in their repositories. There are many possibilities here:

• Use it directly to install IE 6 or 7
• Use their site to check what their scripts do, so you can do it yourself instead (check http://www.playonlinux.com/repository/?cat=4 and then click over IE 6 & 7 entries)
• You can just use it to manage a "Wine environment" and configure different Wine prefixes/versions for each app - even if there's no script available from them, but you manage to configure/run the application by yourself

The answers are in this blog post of mine. Since you already have the Wine PPA with the beta wines, you should already have winetricks. Literally all you need to do at this point is:

winetricks ie6

(or winetricks ie7, or winetricks ie8). Note that I'm not certain if ie8 actually works at this point, but it at least installs.

If you want fake IE, this is now a built in feature of Wine, provided you have Wine's gecko installed. Wine-gecko is in a separate package, but it should have been installed automatically when you installed Wine.