It's Friday - what a day to visit jfoobar!

Using Virtualbox for web development and testing purposes

Written by Wilco Jansen Monday, 29 June 2009 10:50

As web developer you face the challenge to support a wide variety of platforms and browsers. There are some generic tools that help you testing, but sometimes you need those platforms to be available.One way to manage that is to make a multi-boot installation or use several different systems. That is one way to solve this "problem", another way is to use virtualisation. This technique is used to implement a certain kind of virtual machine environment: one that provides a complete simulation of the underlying hardware. The result is a system in which all software capable of execution on the raw hardware can be run in the virtual machine. In particular, this includes all operating systems.

I recently installed the open source edition of VirtualBox and it does exactly this; enabling me to run any operating system as a virtual instance on my desktop system. Installing is pretty straight forward, there is a windows installer for those who want Windows to be their host system, under Ubuntu (or similar Linux distributions) you can use the package manager to install it, or if you want you can compile it.

Virtualbox also provides a full screen option for the host systems. As I have a dual screen, this allows me to seaming-less run two operating systems on each screen. It is even possible to copy/paste information between the two operating systems...how cool is that? I found out that installing the guest additions, which enables the virtual operating system to run in full screen, install very easy under windows. Installing it under Ubuntu 9.04 is a bit more work since there seems to be a small error in the installation script. I found an article that solves that problem pretty quickly, check out the blog on nIxternal site for a brief explanation on how to make it work.