Skip to content

Visual Regression Tests from Windows 10 11 (Ubuntu VM)

Ron B. Yeh edited this page Jan 7, 2022 · 4 revisions

This page is if for someone who does most of their development on Windows and doesn't run OSX or Linux natively. It is probably the easiest way to run the visual regression tests if you are such a person.

You will need to create a Linux box in a virtual machine. You can run the virtual machine in either VMWare or Oracle VirtualBox as a host. This guide shows VirtualBox, but VMWare should work similarly.

Step 1: Enable your computer for virtualization

Before running VirtualBox, you should enable 64-bit virtualization. If you are already running virtual machines on your computer you can skip this step. Depending on how your system was set up, these steps may already be done.

Windows settings

Boot your computer and enter the BIOS menu. In my case, this is done by holding down the delete key before the windows system boots (ASUS). Your system may be a little different depending on your BIOS vendor.

Virtualization is enabled in menu that looks like this (should be Enabled):


BIOS1


BIOS2


After your system boots, in Windows control panel, choose Programs/Turn windows features on or off. Make sure Hypervisor is off (box is unchecked):


control panel


hypervisor

Install VirtualBox and a virtual machine

Install VirtualBox (it's free). Find a good Linux server image. I used a Ubuntu image from OSBoxes.org. Download a server image, it will be about 2GB.

Then add the media from your image to VirtualBox:


Add media


Now create a new virtual machine:


new machine


Set the memory size to be about 1/2 of your physical memory.


memory


Choose the image you just downloaded and added to your media list as the drive:


image2


Then click 'Create'. In the settings for the machine, you should set your processor count to how ever many physical processors on your computer (e.g. 4 for an Intel i5). This will greatly enhance performance.


CPUs


Then start the machine. It will boot up and dump you into a prompt, where you can login.

Install tools

You only need a couple of tools to run vexflow. GIT:

sudo apt install git-all

And Node/NPM

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash -

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Important note: I was unable to get vexflow to work with the latest version of Node(16.x at the time of this writing). The issue is with an NPM package called canvas that has a number of issues. There may be other solutions, but I found it easiest just to install the older version of node as shown above.

> npm -version
6.14.6
> node --version
12.18.3

You can use NVM if you have multiple node versions to support.

From here, you can follow the instructions for build and visual regression tests.

Clone this wiki locally