For the Developer

I am a terminal n00b, but I’m liking it. I grew up on a M$ box and didn’t take the ‘leap’ to a linux / unix based operating system until about a year and a half ago when we got new computers at work. Since that time I have been trying to learn more about the terminal and am very impressed by it. I’ve been using OS X at work and Ubuntu at home and haven’t booted into windows (except for playing games) for almost a year.

Something that I found out in the recent months and finding very useful is the reverse-i-search. By pressing ctrl + r in the terminal (works at least in ubuntu and OS X, probably all real terminals) you are given a console line like the following:

(reverse-i-search)`':

As you type the terminal will search through your terminal history and locate any commands that contain what you search.

For instance if you type ssh it will start searching through the history and show you the last one that you used that had ssh in the command. If the first result isn’t the one that you are looking for you can press ctrl + r to keep the search going and cycle back through your history.

I am still amazed by all the things that I am learning about *nux operating systems and I am only touching the surface.

Something that really bugged me (and still does) about the ubuntu since I installed it is that eclipse is not even close to being the latest version in the package manager. That just seems really strange to me to have such and awesome and widely used IDE not supported in Ubuntu. Anyhow I am not writing this post to just complain about Ubuntu’s quirks, I am writing to detail the steps that I took to get it setup and working on my Ubuntu 8.04.1 64 bit box.

Using the Sun Java

I started off by doing your standard Google search and came up with this page listed promently on the Ubuntu community site:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EclipseIDE

I followed the instructions to get the Java 6 from Sun installed on the system. But I stopped after the install of Java 6 since my install is basically a download of eclipse it wasn’t going to have the /etc/eclipse/java_home that was described on the community page.

With a little more searching I came across this page which gave a brief description his installation. From his post I edited my ~/.bashrc file and added in the export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/ so that my default JAVA_HOME would be the sun java.

Getting Eclipse

To get the latest eclipse distribution I went to the eclipse download page and downloaded the eclipse classic, my preferred base distro. Once I had the file I extracted the eclipse directory. I’m not a linux guru and didn’t know the ‘best’ place to put the eclipse directory so i put it in /opt/.

Running Eclipse

Once I had the application in the directory I decided to add it to my applications menu. I did so by right clicking on the ‘Applications’ menu and selecting the ‘Edit Menus’ option. From there I went into the Applications > Programming menu on the left side and created a ‘New Item’. I chose the type of ‘Application’ and a name of ‘Eclipse’. For the command I entered ‘/opt/eclipse/eclipse -vm /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/bin/java’ just to make sure that eclipse was being loaded with the correct jvm.

Using Eclipse

So far I have not had any problems with any of the plugins that I commonly use (CFEclipse, Subclipse, etc) that aren’t found on all system.

That’s what I did to get Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede running on Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron, so enjoy!

Wow, i hadn’t realized how close in version numbers the two things are…

I was thinking today of how many crazy things that I try to do, how many of them don’t work, and how many of them I don’t share when they do. So today I attempt to share a successful install of ColdFusion 8 (developer version) on my Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit box.

For this installation I am going to connect it to my apache 2 installation. So if you do not have apache or do not want to connect it to apache then just skip that part.

To start off I downloaded the coldfusion-801-lin64.bin file from Adobe.

Once I had the file I made it executable:

$ sudo chmod +x coldfusion-801-lin64.bin

Now it is time to run the installer:

$ sudo ./coldfusion-801-lin64.bin

At first the installer extracts the files for installation then brings up the menu to select the locale. I speak only english so luckily there was the option for english.

Next they give you a nice introduction telling you that you are installing ColdFusion and you can go back in the installer by typing ‘back’ and you can exit the installer by typing ‘quit’. ( I pressed ‘enter’. )

Next we go through the wonderful License Agreement for using ColdFusion. You should probably read it, but since I am only installing the developer version I didn’t pay much attention and pressed enter a lot until I got to the question of if I accept. Then I pressed ‘Y’ and ‘enter’.

Next the installer goes through a pre-installation check to see if your computer has everything that is needed by ColdFusion. My box unfortunately pulled up a warning telling me:

The installer was unable to determine if libstdc++.so.5 is available. The library is necessary for C++ custom tags, webservices and some cfimage functionality to work properly.

When I checked my packages I have libstdc++6 installed. I’m no linux guru, just trying to learn more about it, but I continued the installation in spite of the warning. I’ll write a new post later if this comes back to bite me. So I pressed ‘enter’ and ignored the warning.

For my wonderful installation attempt I chose to select the Developer Edition since I am not rich and this is only for local development anyways. If you are rich, or want to install any of the other options, go ahead, I just may not have the same options that you do.

Next it asks for the installer configuration that I would like to use. At first I thought that I would like to go with the multi-server install, but I have tried playing around with it in the past and it just seemed overkill for what I wanted to do for my development so I chose to do just a regular ’server configuration’. I also found it interesting they decided to include a second semi-colon on this menu, adds a nice touch.

Ofttimes it doesn’t do well to have ColdFusion already installed and install it again. So the next step asks to make sure you don’t already have ColdFusion installed. I do not so i answer no.

The next part is where you get to do whatever set of addons you want. For my install I did not want the documentation since I use livedocs, and I didn’t want LiveCycle and Search Services since they would be overkill and overhead. I also removed the option to start ColdFusion on system init since I am not always developing on it and plan on having a bash script to start it up and shut it down when needed.

I went with the default for the install directory ( /opt/coldfusion8 ). I have no reason to change it and don’t know enough about linux to slap myself for doing it.

No previous version of ColdFusion installed so the next option was a no.

Configuring webservers is what I have had the most trouble with while trying to install ColdFusion before so I’ll see if I can get it right. I selected  the ‘Add Web Server Configuration’ option to try and attach it to apache.

I am running apache so I selected the ‘Apache’ option.

If you would like a handy reference for where your files are for apache check out this post from the crumb.

Next it asks for the directory that contains the httpd.conf file. On this box that the path is:

/etc/apache2

Next is asked for the binary file for apache:

/usr/sbin/apache2

And for the control file used to start and stop apache:

/usr/sbin/apache2ctl

Next it shows the menu about web server configuration. But since I have done my damage I just tell it to ‘Continue with Installation’.

For the administrator location I chose ‘/var/www’ so that it is out there where I can get to it without a lot of changes.

The runtime user is something that I wasn’t sure of, but one of my sys-admin friends told me to use the www-data user for it so that is what i used.

My password for my home dev server I put as ‘1d10t’. And if you want to buy some nice insurance I know a guy….

RDS is one of those things that you hear about… but just never used. At least it is for me. So this time I am going to try out the RDS option this time and see what it can do for me. For that password I chose ‘t01d1′.

Now it shows the installation summary of what it is about to do.

Installation Type:
Server configuration

Licensing:
Developer Edition

Installation Directories:
Product: /opt/coldfusion8
Web root: /var/www

Server Information:
Web Server: Apache (/etc/apache2)
Port:
Search Services: not installed
Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES: not installed
Documentation: not installed
RDS: enabled

Disk Space Information (for Installation Target):
Required: 432,138,779 bytes
Available: 198,957,346,816 bytes

Press enter and it whirls away in ASCII to install your ColdFusion 8 server.

Yeah:

You have successfully completed the first step in installing Adobe ColdFusion 8.

To continue with your installation, go to /opt/coldfusion8/bin and type "./coldfusion start" to start your server.

Once the server, is started log in to the Configuration Wizard at http://[machinename]/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm

Next to see if the ColdFusion server will startup.

$ cd /opt/coldfusion8/bin
$ sudo ./coldfusion start

From past experience if I don’t start the Coldfusion service as root it gives me some strange errors and things do not work right. So here i just told it to startup as root from the beginning.

Starting ColdFusion 8...
The ColdFusion 8 server is starting up and will be available shortly.
======================================================================
Running the ColdFusion 8 connector wizard
======================================================================
Configuring the web server connector (Launched on the first run of the ColdFusion 8 start script)
Running apache connector wizard...
Connector installation succeeded for apache
======================================================================
ColdFusion 8 has been started.
ColdFusion 8 will write logs to /opt/coldfusion8/logs/cfserver.log
======================================================================

Now to test it out. I loaded up my localhost/CFIDE/administrator/ and it pulls up the coldfusion administrator. Looks good to me. Went through the administrator and setup a couple of things, tested out a cfm page in the root. All seems to be working well… good job Adobe.