One of the cooler pieces of software out there is Virtual Box, now from Oracle.  (I say "now", but Sun bought Innotek and then Oracle bought Sun in 2010 ... so not that recently.)  It is free, yay, and let's you run just about any operating system under just about any other one.  For example, I have an Intel PC running Win 10, and using Virtual Box I have Windows XP, Win 11, Win Server 2008R (long story there), Red Hat Linux (Fedora), Ubuntu 20.02 LT, Ubuntu 22.10, ... and (!) OS X Catalina, and OS X Big Sur.

They all run pretty well, and while the performance isn't "native", it's certainly good enough to do real work.  And it sure makes testing easy - you can have different combinations of these running at the same time, and they can all talk to each other and behave as separate machines.

So that's nice ... and tonight I bit the bullet and upgraded Virtual Box to v7.06.  Which meant a whole round of booting each guest operating system and checking for problems, and upgrading the "guest software" which Virtual Box installs to run seamlessly (e.g., display and network drivers).  After a big round of "doing stuff", all is well.  Kind of amazing but all of this software is free.  The biggest problem is actually the oldest system, Win XP, which needs to have license keys etc.  (I had an old MSDN license so I have legit license keys.)  The newer stuff is just download and use and free.  Incredible.

Oh, and so why did I do this?  Well ... I made a change to the CSS on my blog, and wanted to check the appearance in various browsers on various platforms :)

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