One of the trial of web development is ensuring that your site works across a range of browsers.

Standards compliance is an important part of this - but testing cannot be avoided.

I work on Ubuntu, and use VirtualBox together with a licensed copy of Windows XP to test in a Windows environment, which also allows me to at least test the Sindows version of Safari.

Unfortunately Microsoft's decision to tie Internet Explorer closely with the operating system means that it isn't possible to install IE6 alongside IE7.

Having just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 my key observation is that it's important to read the release notes first.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

There are a few bugs which have affected me

One of the great things about Debian/Ubuntu is the consistency with which system documentation is placed in /usr/share/doc/

Assuming you have a web server installed this documentation is then available at http://localhost/doc/

But to keep filesize down - many files are compressed and have to be decompressed before you can read them.

The browser can actually do that compression on the fly - if it receives the right headers - what it needs to be told is that the content is compressed plain text.

One of the few things that Linux hasn't done well is allowing the user to add or change monitors.

It looks like this is changing with the new utility xrandr.

I haven't fine tuned this yet (or even tested it much) but I do have a dual head display - with the virtual screen spanning two displays.

I'll come back and document this properly - but for now here's what I did.

To configure the Squid proxy server to work for subversion access you will need to tell it to recognise some non-standard methods.

Add the following to squid.conf

extension_methods MKACTIVITY CHECKOUT REPORT MERGE

Without these settings I could browse the repository - but I couldn't commit to it. Now commit works too :-)

The audio controls for the Dell hardware are less than obvious; I didn't even notice that there is a built in microphone.

Below are screen grabs of the settings that work for me - giving audio at the right levels for skype calls.

On the settings tab; ensure "capture" is enabled, "digital" seems to control the mic level - I found midway to be about right - higher levels caused distortion.

To set up squid to allow password authenticated access add the following to your squid.conf file.

Then create passwords with the htpasswd program.

Health Warning

Sometimes you want to look at the contents of a package without installing it.

Sometimes you want to compare your installed version with the original package.

Run the following commands

To unpack (without installing) in a temp directory.

If you try to access a subversion repository over http while using a 3G connection from three.co.uk you may receive an error message like.

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/repos'
svn: Processing PROPFIND request response failed: Premature end of file. (/repos)

This is because three.co.uk uses a proxy to interecept web traffic on their network.

After an upgrade I found my 3G USB modem wasn't loading properly.

For some reason the airprime module was connection to ttyUSB0
making it unavailable.

To fix this I just added the airprime module to the blacklisting in