Manually set a hostname for IP address (i.e. /etc/hosts equiv.?) I am a web developer and am developing our website on my local desktop machine. I have an android phone (htc desire running android 2.2). I want to test what our web application looks like on android. I can connect to the same wifi network as my desktop machine, however we make use of several hardcoded fake domain names in our web application. On my Ubuntu Linu7x desktop machine I use /etc/hosts to set these domain names to local IP addresses.

Is there anyway to do this on android? I want "foo.xyz" (our testing domain name) to point to 172.31.1.67 (my internal desktop machine). Is there any way to do this without rooting the phone (as my android phone is not rooted now)
Firefox Mobile supports HTTP proxies, so whilst it's a different rendering engine you should at least be able to get a feel for how your UI performs on a small touchscreen.  Here's how to get to the secret config section - http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/758279

The default browser includes proxy support in Gingerbread (although that doesn't help you and your unrooted Desire right now, HTC should be offering an OTA update to Gingerbread soon, or it may spur you into rooting and re-flashing your phone).

(For both of these, you'd need to configure a proxy on your network so that it can serve up your foo.xyz domain)

Finally, you could always use the Android SDK's emulator.  Performance will be painfully slow, but you would at least be running the same rendering engine.

Edit: As GAThrawn mentions in the comments above, you could also possibly achieve what you want using DNS entries on your network's default DNS server or a development DNS server.  Your phone will pick up your wifi network's default DNS server, or you can change it to something specific via Settings > Wireless &amp; networks > Wi-Fi settings > Menu softkey > Advanced.