Alex Le’s Blog

So I just realize that I am working on lots of CSS stuff right now. The toughest part is not writing the CSS itself as any capable web desinger can do it but how to make the CSS file working across the browsers spectrum: with IE takes 90% (and decreasing, if IE7 doesn’t get out soon), Firefox (some %, but highly standard-compliant), Safari (used by 3% of Mac-lovers), Opera (I have no idea about the adoption rate).

People somtimes say that the detail is the devil, so testing the CSS on such browsers on the same platform (specifically a PC) is quite a hassle. Safari is JUST for Mac and IE on Mac is the worst browser to remain till this day. Luckily, IE on Mac is dead and Safari is based on KHTML, the major HTML engine for Linux used by Konqueror. To test the webpage for compability with Safari is now equivalent to testing the page on a KHTML-browser. But KHTML hasn’t been ported to Windows completedly, it still remains only for Linux. The only project on sourceforge to port KHTML to windows has been quite dead for 2 years. Luckily we have VMWare on PC to emulate Linux.There is an brief tutorial to get VMWare with Suse 10.5 with KDE working on a PC here at Jedisthlm.com.
I’m giving it a try first to see if this method is effective or else I have to invest in a Mac sometimes later on like in 2, 3 years or sooner if I can get enough extra money from the freelance work I’m doing now. More to report later…

Update:

Since the last post, I have installed and tried the VMWare Player and VMWare Workstation 5.5.1. My take on VMWare: very, very impressive. My previous experience with virtual platform hasn’t been that impressive. I have previously used the Microsoft VirtualPC version 4 before to run FreeBSD for a class. With X running, the FreeBSD Virtual Machine works just fine but I didn’t feel right: the mouse tracking is kinda strange, the GUI is noticably slower, etc.. Technically speaking I’m not a *Nix guy at all so I’m just sayin from a “normal user” perspective.

With VMWare platform, on the other hand, the Suse10.5 with KDE works and feel just like a native Linux OS. I can drag a window and see its contents at the same time quite smoothly. And KDE 3.5 just makes me feel like I’m home at a Windows machine. To test the performance of the emulated machine, I installed a few software like Apache: the speed is not bad at all. For clarification, I’m using a Dell 420SC server with 1GB with ECC Ram, SATA drives, and ATI x300 graphics card. Compared this experiment to my last experience with VirtualPC 4, I can say VMWare 5.5 is much improved.

Also Flash plugins works amazingly very well in this case. I installed Firefox 1.5.0.4 and the Flash 7.0 plugins (via the command-line) and surfed to a few sites. Even flash streaming video works! The video is displayed as smooth and crisp as it is on my host Windows XP.

Final remarks

So now I can have this VMWare little baby under my belt for web-compability testing and development. Testing for Safari is now equivalent to open up the VMware machine and run with Konqueror. The process takes about 1 minute if not less. Also there is a host of other applications that can be used on the VMWare platform such as the enterprise-level SourceForge project management, the Buildix platform, etc… Or a beowulf cluster can be built virtually with the VMWorkstation. The potential is endless.

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