Virtual Box Mac Rendering

[andrwcris]

Lifehacker recently had an article on running Mac OS and Linux via virtual box, hosted on Windows to test software etc. I am looking for a fairly cheap and hopefully painless solution to test css rendering on Mac and wondered how accurate this method would be as I'm sure I read somewhere that it still wasn't perfect as it uses the host OS for some things?

At the moment I have Chrome, IE 8 (+ 7 via dev bar), FF, Safari for windows and Opera running on my WinXP station but would really like to be sure by testing on Mac and possibly linux too - any suggestions as to how good the above would be as I've setup similar before and its usually pretty straight forward.

Thanks,

Andrew

[Paul O'B]

Sorry, I can't really help as I haven't tested that setup.

You can do the reverse quite easily and I have windows 7 and windows xp running on my mac with no problem using parallels.

I believe you can run linux from a cd without installing but haven't tried it myself.

You may find some other useful info in this old thread.

[andrwcris]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the feedback and the link to the other thread, I will probably have a go at getting the virtual box setup and see how it goes though unless I get some more feedback from here I guess I should still set up a standalone mac on an old machine to make sure

[Paul O'B]

Hi Paul,

I guess I should still set up a standalone mac on an old machine to make sure

That's what I did originally and bought an old mac on ebay for testing only. However, I treated myself a few months ago to a 27" imac which allows me to run windows on the same machine if needed. It's a great machine but very pricey.

I still have the PC running Xp as well as a laptop running vista and have windows 7 on the mac in parallels so it means I can test most things quite easily.

[andrwcris]

Thanks Paul, lets hope the Virtual Box is very good - if I go down that route (27" new Mac) my wife might have a few choice words!