I created a program on 64-bit Windows 7 and it works great. Now I'd like to try it on other operating systems (e.g., 32-bit Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux). However, this is my only computer. Is there any easy way to do this, or do I need to track down computers with these other operating systems?
Hi Jeffrey
You can use VirtualBox [1] which lets you create virtual machines and install different OS on them. Those virtual computers will "live" only inside this software and nothing permanent will be installed in your PC. It doesn't intervene with your current OS and when finished using it, you can simple close the software. This is a standard approach in evaluating your software aspects in different OS.
[1] https://www.virtualbox.org
Dimitris
Hi Jeffrey
You can use VirtualBox [1] which lets you create virtual machines and install different OS on them. Those virtual computers will "live" only inside this software and nothing permanent will be installed in your PC. It doesn't intervene with your current OS and when finished using it, you can simple close the software. This is a standard approach in evaluating your software aspects in different OS.
[1] https://www.virtualbox.org
Dimitris
Hi Jeffrey
I am also writing computer programs on a 64bit Windows 8 computer. To test my programs I switch to a 32 bit Vista OS. I agree with Dimitris above, testing the programs on different specification machines will be a software issue. On my Windows 8 machine I use a 64 bit enabled C++ compiler. This compiler has been specially modified for 64 bit machines. When I switch to my 32 bit machine I am using the same compiler but an earlier version which was designed for use on 32 bit computers.
Other than actually testing your programs on 32 bit machines I can only agree with Dimitris above as I have heard this program works quite well most of the time.
You can use metrics to perform these tests in virtual machines. The metrics can be found in ISO/IEC SQuaRE series according to chosen quality characteristics.
KVM (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page) and Parallels (http://www.parallels.com/) are other alternatives to VirtualBox. To run on different hw architectures (Solaris/Sparc, AIX/POWER, etc) would require access to those specific hardware platforms.
if you plan to test your program more than just a couple of times, you should think about a continuous integration system like jenkins.
you can tell your CI-System to start a specific virtual system image and run the tests on this machine automatically. so every time you change something in your implementation these changes can be tested on all other systems automatically.
I just wanted to come back and say that VirtualBox worked great. Thanks for all the suggestions.
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