Monthly Archives: May 2007

Gentoo and an Aptana Howto

Posted by in Guides

Well yesterday, both Gentoo 2007.0 and Aptana milestone 8 were released. Thanks to some bugs in a previous release I was able to test milestone 8 on Gentoo last week; that was before ATI’s drivers went kamikaze.

Overall I am impressed with milestone 8, it features more advanced support of PHP, including variable highlighting. With Gentoo to install Aptana just make a folder in /usr/lib called aptana, then extract the archive to that point. After that make a file in /usr/bin called aptana, open it in your favorite editor (nano) and add the following:

#!/bin/sh
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox
exec /usr/lib/aptana/Aptana

Save the file and do a chmod 755 on it so that it becomes executable. Now try typing in the command aptana& into your terminal. If all goes right you should see the aptana splash screen. If you get a bug, look at the log file it directs you to. Should you see something like org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)] then your mozilla path is not correct. If the executable fails in general, you need to make sure you have the JRE 1.5 or newer. To get this just run emerge -p sun-jre-bin (you don’t have to use Sun’s JRE but that is what I use) if you like what you see then rerun the command without the -p. Once portage finishes doing its stuff, try executing Aptana again. It should work then, if not search the Aptana forums.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Vista, Ha! No, Thanks.

Posted by in General

Currently Windows only serves one purpose that Linux cannot. Think about it for a while. The only thing Windows does better is gaming. For the past 5 days, I lived without Windows.

There was a method to the ‘madness’, though something crapped out on me (ATI’s display driver) that just set me back a week. Luckily, I now work off of a 20GiB USB hard drive for anything important (work), which is good for when a system goes bonkers. In the process I realized two things:

  1. I really need a wide screen monitor.
  2. Having a laptop or some other powerful computer combined with my current setup would be nice.

Honestly, the realization of needing a wide screen monitor came earlier, but with the multiple desktops Gnome and KDE have, switching between them was fine, but it would be nice to fit Aptana and Firefox side-by-side for the benefit of testing. I’m just waiting for the ones that can fit 1080p HD video plus the taskbars to drop in price—one step down in resolution saves 300 USD. As for having an additional powerful computer (ideally a much more powerful one) so that I can have two separate computers, one that only runs Gentoo for work and daily use. Leaving the other open for playing games, and probably running distcc to aid in compiling for the other.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

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