[thelist] Suggestions for Mac test environment

Arlen.P.Walker at jci.com Arlen.P.Walker at jci.com
Fri Aug 24 13:13:48 CDT 2001


Sorry for the delay, had my head down. Next week looks even worse, if it
matters. Anyhoo:

>One convenience of working with Mac OS 9.x and prior, is you can install
>multiple versions of the same browser, on the same drive, without any
system
>trickery.

Wrong. MSIE 4.5 and 5.0 can't co-exist properly without a bucketload of
trickery. Oh, you can install 4.5 and 5.0 on the same machines, but when
you launch 4.5, you're not seeing 4.5 anymore; you're actually seeing a
bizarre hybrid of 4.5 and 5.0. When 5.0 installs, it replaces some of the
libraries used by 4.5, you see. So you're running mostly 4.5 code, but with
some 5.0 thrown in. You want a real test of 4.5, you need another system.

Luckily doing things like that isn't hard. Just make multiple partitions on
the disk, and put a your test systems together. Then you can choose which
partition to boot from via startup disk.

It's also been my experience that installing 5.0 breaks AOL, but that just
could be because AOL is broken anyway. ;{>}

>You can run both OS 9 and X on the same box, although you might find it
>clunky as OS 9 runs in it's memory bubble in OS X, and you might find some
>software (browser) behavior to be wonky.

Or you can dual-boot, boot in OS 9 when you want to test from it, then flip
to the startup disk control panel and choose to reboot into OS X. Works
quite well for me, anyway.

Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen.P.Walker at JCI.Com
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