When developing web sites, it is essential that the developer supports as many browsers and operating systems as possible. Some companies are ignorant to the wider audience and simply create web projects which only really work in Internet Explorer. Whilst this suits the slim majority of users, consumers using other browsers such as Firefox, Opera, and Safari are left with poorly created web sites that appear broken.

If your development environment of choice is Linux, you might have experienced the painstaking task of dual-booting into Windows, then going back to Linux, and so forth. You might have a separate testing machine running Windows… or, you might just neglect to test fully and risk facing the consequences of lost business.

We test all of our projects across multiple platforms and browsers to provide a consistent and accessible experience for as many web site visitors as possible. We achieve this by creating accessible XHTML web sites using CSS which gracefully degrades.

Additionally, we use Virtual Machine software to increase our productivity and work rate during cross platform testing. The software we run is called Qemu, which runs on Linux systems. Qemu can be used to install various operating systems which will then run from within your Linux operating system, removing the need for you to change computers, reboot into another operating system, etc. All you need is the free Qemu software, and the installation CD/DVD of the operating system you wish to install.

The link below will help get you started with your own Linux and Windows Qemu setup:

Instructions for installing Windows XP with Qemu on Ubuntu Linux

If you installed Windows XP or Windows 2000, you may receive the error message “a problem is preventing windows from accurately checking the license for this computer”.

If so, the problem can be rectified by following our guide to running Windows XP on Qemu under linux with error “a problem is preventing windows from accurately checking the license for this computer”.