I’ve been designing and building websites for 10 years now and in all that time I’ve used a Mac as my working machine along with a PC to test on for IE. Having a spare copy of Windows XP about I bought a copy of the Parallels virtualisation software. I installed Parallels along with XP on an iMac with 1Gb of RAM, it does run on 1Gb but it is fairly slow. I immediately upgraded my iMac to the maximum 3Gb (I really didn’t need much in the way of persuasion). With 3Gb available I set the ‘PC’ to use 1Gb of this, it made massive difference in the speed, it’s every bit as fast as the actual PC I had been using for testing.

I now have a ‘PC’ with XP SP2 and IE6 as well as a ‘PC’ with XP SP3 and IE7 along with the multiple IE hack running. I also threw on Firefox 3 for good measure. The great thing about using Parallels is the ability to copy the entire PC thus avoiding any cockups with rogue software. I’ll probably set up a software testing PC that won’t matter if I screw it up. XP uses my existing Mac internet connection so I didn’t even have to bother with setting up any of the networking.

I had a go at installing Xubuntu, it did install but so far has no net connection. I will have to look at this further, it would be great to be able to test Linux browser compatibility too.

Finally I can design, build and test websites on one machine.

I finally got a distribution of Linux to successfully install on my Vaio. No problems with detecting the CD-ROM drive, screen sets up automatically and wifi works. I’m documenting the process as a record so I don’t forget.

Hardware

• Sony Vaio PCG-C1MGP
• CD-ROM drive PCGA-CD51/A
• Netgear MA521 PCMCIA

Step 1

Download the Alternate install CD of Feisty Fawn as the Vaio only has 128mb of RAM.

Step 2

Wipe the Vaio hard disk, I’m going to use the laptop mostly for web development so Windows is pretty much useless to me.

Step 3

Next install the following using Synaptic Package Manager

• ndiswrapper-common
• ndiswrapper-source
• ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

Now download the Windows XP drivers for the Netgear card. Extract and copy NET8180.inf and rtl8180.sys onto a flash drive and copy to the Vaio.

Open a teminal window and type:
sudo ndiswrapper -i ~/drivers/drivername.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m

Then open System > Network and configure the network settings then activate the connection.