Have you gotten this to work recently? It looks like this script fetches the images that are listed on http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575 which they say "will shutdown and become completely unusable on November 17, 2011".
Other questions on that forum indicate that there was exactly the same issue in 2010 and in 2009, so it looks like in practice, you can test with old versions of IE for free, but only in the summer months. It's certainly better than nothing, but it's not something I would depend on.
Here's the script that will install them for you (works on my Ubuntu): https://github.com/xdissent/ievms