Joey Adams Dot Net

I’ve been dying to have a Linux workstation. I have BackTrack 3 installed in VM on my desktop, but that is not enough. I miss my gentoo installation, and considered it, but it just takes too long and my schedule is more than full.

I cannot change over my desktop OS due to using Media Center for my home pvr, see other posts for details. Also because I game every now and then, and use the CS3 suite, so oh well. Dual booting is not worth it when I can work off a VM.

So my laptop is the choice then, with it’s semi-broken screen and all. I decide to go with Fedora, it’s an easy install, a programmers type of distro, and I am familiar with it from the past.  I download Fedora 9 Sulphur for amd64, install was FLAWLESS, just perfect. Boot up, everything works like supposed to.

Only problems I have noticed is with networking. The manager updates /etc/resolv.conf with nameservers, however if you have more than 3 nameservers, or some of your nameservers do not work, you can have poor performance.  At home, I only get my gateway as a nameserver, I’ll work with that later. At work, I’m assigned 5 nameservers.. for some ungodly reason. So I just remove all but 2, which work great, and is fast.

Now comes installing my favorite php IDE, Zend Studio. I download the tarball from Zend for linux (only x86 available). Trying to install gives a plethora of java exceptions and errors. Seems to be a number of problems with locations, JRE 6 and some settings in the installer.

If you google amd64 zend studio, you will see what I mean. I tried every fix out there, twice. Downgrading to JRE 5, passing the java path to the installer, editing the installer with sed, etc.

Somehow or another, at times I was able to run the installer, and at one time was able to start ZDE. I ended up fish-hooked, I installed it, but could not run the uninstaller because of the exceptions. I spent a good 8-10 hours trying to install this. I was completely unsuccessful.

My advice is, if you have an amd64 processor, don’t worry about it and install Fedora x86, theres not a big difference from what I hear. Once I installed Fedora 9 x86, I decided to download Zend Studio for Eclipse. It installed, ran, and works fine, not a single problem, can’t beat that.

I now have a very happy install. I just have to start learning to use Zend Studio for Eclipse, as I mainly develop in Zend Studio 5.5, although I was on the Zend Neon beta, so at least I have familiarity with it.