As mentioned before I switched to Mac OS X. In many situations it is so much easier and more productive than with Windows, things just work right out of the box! I might write something about the Mac and OS X in a later post...

Right now I'm also out of Germany and am in the States for a semester abroad. More about that and the time I already spent here in a later post, too...

This means that I don't have a Windows machine at hand right now. Unfortunately Macs don't make up the majority of computers and thus you still need to make sure your sites work across different platforms.

The easiest way at the moment to achieve this is to run Windows in a virtual machine. I'm actually really looking forward to VMware's solution for OS X but as this is not available yet I'm using Parallels Desktop for Mac for now.

The cool thing is that OS X comes with Apache and php right away so that you could just start using TYPO3. Unfortunately it is php4 and thus I needed to install php5 and of course MySQL. I also configured Apache to use virtual hosts so that I can access my development websites with www.domain.loc or www.other-domain.loc.

You can set up Parallels in a way that you can access your local Apache on OS X from Windows running in a virtual machine to test your websites with f.e. Internet Explorer.

To do this you should get the Parallels_Desktop_for_Mac_User_Guide.pdf  from http://www.parallels.com/en/support/documentation/. On pages 104-106 it describes how to set up Host-Only Networking for the virtual machine and how to have Internet access anyway by using Internet sharing under OS X.

The next step would be to let Windows know about your web server and your local websites. To do this you need to find out the IP for OS X in Windows. In Windows press Apple/Command+R, in the following dialog box type "cmd" (without the quotes) and hit Enter. This will bring up the command line for Windows. Now type "ipconfig /all" to see Windows' network settings, you should find a line listing the IP for the Standardgateway, we'll need that in the next step.

Now in Windows Explorer go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and open "hosts" with notepad.exe. This file serves as a look up directory similar to a DNS server to keep it simple. The file describes the format it uses, and you can now add your virtual host domain names in this file by pointing the domain names to the IP of the standard gateway. After saving that file you should be done and things should be working.

To test whether it is working just fire up Internet Explorer or any other browser of your choice and enter a domain which is served by the Apache running on OS X.