If you want / need to install Internet Explorer in Linux, I highly recommend IEs4Linux by Sergio Lopes.
IEs4Linux is the simpler way to have Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Linux (or any OS running Wine).
I recently purchased a new Dell 1420n with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed. One of the first things I wanted to do was install all of my development tools, including IEs4Linux. What should have been an easy installation turned into a nightmare. I kept running into python errors that aborted the install. Once I finally got the application to install it was unusable. The IE toolbar was missing, including the address bar, the application would frequently crash, and I experienced maddening display bugs.
Apparently the blank screen bug has been a widespread issue. Sergio has addressed it on his blog and pushed an emergency release of IEs4Linux, version 2.99.0.1, to resolve this issue only.
That’s all well and good, but I still had the python issues to deal with. What finally worked for me was to install IEs4Linux with the –no-gui flag, like so:
$ ./ies4linux --no-gui
For more information on installing IEs4Linux, including IE versions 5 and 5.5, visit the IEs4Linux installation page.