How to design html pages which renders properly in windows while staying in Linux?

Question

I usually prefer linux for programming( i program in django on Ubuntu). But often i need to design html pages which renders properly in Windows and Linux?

How iam currently doing the above is

1. Design (Fix) html page in linux

2. Reboot to windows check whether the design is proper or not. if not reboot to linux repeat step1 ,step2

i felt the above process is tedious. Is there any easier way to do this?

Answer 1

You could use a virtual machine to host your Windows installation, if you have a Windows license (which I'm guessing you do by the fact you reboot into Windows), and the RAM to keep a virtualized instance of XP or whatever Windows you use to test.

Using VMWare or VirtualBox you could set up a shared folder so both the virtual instance and Linux can look at the same file to test the website locally.

Answer 2

If a website is being correctly displayed doesn't depend much on the operating system. It mainly depends on the webbrowser and its engine.

A webpage being rendered in FF 3.0 on Linux will look exactly as on a windows machine.

Some suggestions if your browser doesn't support Linux by default:

• Use a virtual machine (such as VirtualBox)
• Install desired browser in Wine
• You can use online renderers such as: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

Answer 3

There is a great free service called BrowserShots that you can provide a link to which will take screenshots of a site in multiple browsers and OS's. It supports the Linux, Windows, OS X and BSD operating systems, and a large number of major and minor browser (including several versions of each).

There's also IEs4Linux which will use Wine to install Internet Explorer within Linux. This solution isn't perfect though, as the rendering isn't exact and it can be difficult to install (and get working) any plugins beyond flash. Also, IE 7 & 8 aren't officially supported yet.

Other Options:

• For environments with multiple devs, create one server with several virtualized windows installs with different versions. Devs can use remote desktop to test sites on the local network.
• If you have a 2nd machine handy, install windows on it and a kvm switch to test on this system.

Answer 4

Use as many browser platforms for testing as you can under Linux: Firefox, Opera, Konqueror. If you pages work in these browsers, test in IE using BrowserShots or Wine.

Answer 5

as Adviced by many people here:

i advice using virtual machines, if you have a server at hand or even better multiple servers you could try and install vmware server version 2.0 so that you and other people can use the same (virtual) machine for testing.

also it is true that most of the free browsers look the same on diferend Operating systems but bare in mind that some operating systems are lacking fonts you might want, this will make a huge diference.

with that in mind i advice go virtual an go for a good and free selution vmware server

Answer 6

Just to add to what people have said about Virtual Machines, you need to know how to make your django test server available to them. To do this, I use:

python manage.py runserver 192.168.1.xx:80

where xx is your local IP address. Then you can browse the site as you're making it, both from virtual boxes running on your Linux host and from other machines on your local network.