ievms is a small bash script written by Greg Thornton that takes the pain out of installing the Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPCs that Microsoft provides to web developers.

This is very useful, as a lot of us have to test our code on a Mac or Linux machine, and cannot get to a Windows machine to test the most popular browser in the world (or is it?).

The ievms installation instructions worked great for me in Mountain Lion, with one exception. When I was prompted to install the VirtualBox Extension Pack, I couldn’t enter my password in the password prompt.

To solve this, I did the following:

Run the ievms command as the instructions indicate. Hit Control-C in iTerm (or Terminal.app) to cancel the ievms script when the password dialog you cannot type in appears. Double-clicked VirtualBox from /Applications. Hit Command-, (comma) to open Preferences. Clicked the Extensions Tab. Clicked the small Add Package icon to the right of the Extension Packages text box. This shows you a file chooser. Hit Command-Shift-G to open a text window to type a path into. Typed “~/.ievms” and Hit Enter. Selected the VirtualBox Extension Pack from the file box, waited for the install to complete and closed VirtualBox.

Once this is done, follow the ievms install instructions from the beginning again, and it should work great. It did for me!

I hope this helps someone else out there.