Installing Aptana Studio On Linux (Ubuntu)

This post is about installing Aptana Studio on a Linux machine. I have tested and successfully installed Aptana with these instructions on Ubuntu (8.10).

I am a great fan of Gedit for ruby on rails development (So much for the lack of TextMate for Linux). Recently, I have been using the Dojo Toolkit extensively. I also felt the need for a fast debugger. This made me look at Ruby (and Rails) IDEs. So, I tested Netbeans, Aptana Studio (RadRails) and 3rdRail (CodeGear).

I should say that Aptana Studio wins over the rest. The reasons are:
1. Aptana is free. (3rdRail is about $199)
2. Aptana is fast. (Netbeans is slow for code completion and debugging)
3. Aptana is built on Eclipse. (I really love the UI of eclipse)
4. Built-In support for Prototype, Scriptaculous, Dojo and other JavaScript toolkits.

Anyway, if you are ready to give Aptana Studio a whirl then read on.

You need to follow these steps to install Aptana:
1. Install JRE 1.6 - On Ubuntu - sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre
2. Install Xulrunner 1.8.* - On Ubuntu - sudo apt-get xulrunner
3. Download Aptana Studio
4. Create a script Aptana.sh
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/xulrunner
/#{your_aptana_install_path}/AptanaStudio
5. Make it executable
chmod +x Aptana.sh
6. Run Aptana.sh

Voila! Aptana should now run without any errors. The main issue here is that most Linux distributions now come with a newer version of xulrunner and Aptana only works with xulrunner 1.8.*

Party On!