Installing Aptana 2.0 on openSUSE 11.2

I’ve recently switched to openSUSE from Windows. Somethings were a struggle but I’ve worked through most of the issues I came across. One of the toughest for me was setting up Aptana 2.0 with their now discontinued PHP plug-in. Why? Because the PDT plug-in feels so inferior compared to their discontinued plug-in. Any way here’s the steps that worked for me…

  1. I removed the OpenJDK Java packages that were installed by default and then I installed the Sun JRE.
    1. My limited experience shows that it is faster.
  2. Install the latest QtCurve-gtk2 library from the KDE:Backports repository
    1. This is to fix a bug that made some user interface elements  disabled. For example the search and URL for SVN.
  3. I then downloaded the latest Aptana Studio for Linux.
  4. I used Arch to extract it to /opt/Aptana Studio 2.0/
    1. Start Krunner by hitting ALT-F2
    2. Launch Arch by typing kdesu arch
    3. Browse to the /opt/ path and extract preserving the paths.
  5. Then finally create a shell script to launch Aptana. The shell script fixes another bug where some buttons would not respond to a mouse click.
    1. Open Kwrite – ALT-F2 kdesu kwrite
    2. Type in the code from below.
    3. An save “/opt/Aptana Studio 2.0/AptanaStudio” with file name startaptana
    4. Change the permissions to make it executable. This can be done by right clicking it in Dolphin and check the Is Executable box. Be sure to launch Dolphin by ALT-F2 kdesu dolphin.
  6. Disable the “Prevent empty clipboard” feature in Klipper. This will fix the eliminate the erratic  copy / paste issue.
  7. Finally create a shortcut on the panel to launch Aptana.

Hope this helps someone!

Shell Script Code

#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
"/opt/Aptana Studio 2.0/AptanaStudio"