How to : Start Developing Websites in Ubuntu
I got a comment before that I don’t explain to users to give them a full experience .. Again I’m not doing that .. Nobody can do a full guide to help people in a single post.
In this post I’ll show how to start developing and design your projects on Ubuntu If you’re moving from Windows ..
Installing LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
I previously mentioned in a post how to install Apache, PHP and MySQL on Linux with easy steps to do that .
Also there’s an easy way to do that by installing all the package at once (Thanks to Shady) using tasksel . Open a Terminal and type the following command :
sudo tasksel install lamp-serverThen you can go to your localhost url (http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1)
Tools to use
Same like all designers used to do on a windows, You need applications to design, develop, code and preview your projects .
Editors
There are many editors to edit project files, so you can use your default GNOME Text Editor (gedit) and do some enhancement like enable highlighting, line numbers and Installing Extra Plugins using the following command :
sudo apt-get install gedit-pluginsAptana Studio is a great editor to develop most of programming languages projects like php, Ruby on Rails, python, Ajax, Jaxer, html, css . This Gudie would help you downloading and Installing Aptana Studio in few easy steps . It would allow you also to connect to FTP Server, Edit files online which I think is a great tool .
Aptana Also provides a set of Plugins that would help more to get your projects more exciting and offer you other features with simple steps like ASP.NET Ajax, Prototype Framework, Mootools. You would fine other external plugins by developers for Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress .
Browsers
It’s one of the most important developer tools, You will need to preview your projects on most browsers available. Thanks to Open Source and freeware projects, We can preview our projects on Ubuntu using Firefox, Chrmoium (Google Chrome), Opera and You can also view your website on IE inside Ubuntu Thanks to Wine, Check this guide on How to get IE7 on Wine and you can also get a windows inside Ubuntu using VirtualBox, Check this out
Graphic Editors
Adobe Photoshop is the leading Graphic and Photo editor in the world and It’s just available on Windows and Mac, But there are other alternatives to do your graphic designs on Ubuntu . One of them is Using GIMP, an open-source photo and graphic editor for Linux/Unix which is installed by default in known linux distributions and Ubuntu for sure .
If you got used to Adobe Photoshop, You would try Installing Photoshop on Wine . New Versions of Photoshop Like CS4 or CS3 is very hard to be installed on Wine So You might try doing that with CS or CS2 , or You can try finding a cracked portable version of Photoshop CS or CS2 which will work perfectly just like what you see on Windows or Mac .
KDE Users
I never ever used KDE Interface before to develop a project, I don’t say KDE is a bad choice but I prefer having GNOME on my computer or laptop . For KDE users, You can use Aptana Studio like what I said before, and also You may try using NetBeans which is another open-source java based IDE and works with Windows, Mac and Linux just like Aptana Studio. And you can use KWriter to do your simple edits .
Note
As I’m an Arab and I work on Multilingual Projects for Clients, I’ve chosen all the previous recommendations which is working for any language perfectly and you won’t get annoyed with getting an application which doesn’t support a specific characters like Arabic or Chinese.
That was just a starter guide, you would discover much more than what I wrote here .. but sometimes newbies need a simple guide .