Dreamweaver on Linux
December 22, 2006I’ve been trying for the last 2 years to find a decent web development platform for Linux, and still can’t find one.
I truly don’t understand what the big deal is with porting Dreamweaver to Linux. It already works on the Macintosh, so what would the big deal be making it work on QT or GTK+?
I think that if there were a decent Dreamweaver port for linux, that would end up converting a TON of people to the Linux camp. Seriously, for everyday work, I find GIMP totally acceptable for most photo work that I need to do for sites. Sure, I love Fireworks and I love Photoshop, but it’s not a big block to getting website editing and development done. I can make it work.
But in terms of development environments, all I’ve found for Linux are:
- Quanta: Great for PHP hackers, and great for the way that I develop sites (i.e. the site upload feature is very similar to dreamweavers). However, the visual editor is terrible. 90% of the time that I’m using the visual editor in Dreamweaver, it’s for the purposes of SPEED. I’m trying to select something, fix it, and move on. Not navigate through someone else’s messed-up code and table layout to find something. The Quanta visual editor doesn’t work at all, really – crashing on even the simplest of pages.
- Bluefish: Just a glorified gEdit, as far as I’m concerned.
- Aptana: Looks really nifty, but I can’t get it to work at all on my FC6 box. Also, has no visual editor, like Dreamweaver.
- Mozilla Compozer: Would be almost usable if (a) it had a site upload / management setup like Dreamweaver (i.e. doesn’t assume you’re directly editing, via FTP, the files that run your website) and (b) if it didn’t horribly mangle your source code every time you make an edit.
I’m all for open source software, but in this case I can’t get around the NEED for Dreamweaver. Anyone have any clues how to persuade Adobe to move ahead on this?
technorati tags:dreamweaver, linux, aptana, quanta, bluefish, mozilla, web, development, html, editor
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Maybe you’ll want to try Nvu (www.nvu.com) or its clone kompozer (kompozer.net).
Hope it helps 🙂
Deinitely tried NVU and Kompozer, but the unfortunate fact is that (a) both NVU and Kompozer do some gnarly code re-writing when you use the visual editor, and as such end up mangling a lot of my nice HTML, and (b) the way that it manages sites assumes that you’re directly editing with FTP the files for your live site. Dreamweaver (and Quanta, interestingly enough) both have more powerful site management so that you can store your files locally but then do a shift+ctrl+U or ctrl+shift+s or whatever to upload to your test server and preview.
So, if I could either (a) get Quanta to have a visual interface like Dreamweaver, or (b) PLEASE get a Dreamweaver 8 to run right out of my Linux box, I’d be ecstatic.
Well both Dreamweaver and Fireworks 8 work pretty much flawlessly on my Linux box. I’m running ubuntu linux 6.10 (Edgy-Eft), and using the latest version of wine, both programs installed and ran without one single tweak. There are one or two little niggles but definitely minor. Speed is excellent and im thrilled that the only two programs tying me to windows are now working just fine with linux. I havent needed to use the ftp update portion of the program yet but i see no difficulties as Internet Explorer seems to have no problems accessing the internet through wine.
Wow – that rocks. Do you have any tutorial or write-up you found on how to get this rolling? I got Dreamweaver MX running on my Fedora Core 6 box only via Crossover Office, and straight-up Wine wouldn’t run it. I could have been doing something lame though, so I’d love to know how you did it.
Yeah well i would love to reveal some amazing hack i pulled off but i seriously read about wine, installed it, downloaded dreamweaver 8 trial and ran the installer from terminal via wine (eg wine dreamweaver.exe). That said it seems i picked an opportune time to try this as it seems there used to be a terminal error in the dreamweaver install process that has only been resolved very recently. Which version of wine did you use? It also seems Dreamweaver 8 works better than previous versions. Dreamweaver MX 2004 seems to be a dead loss while MX works for some. How far did you get when you tried it? Oh yeah and i just tried FTP and it’s all good there too.
Just google “using dreamweaver on linux”