I installed Ubuntu on my main laptop (the
ThinkPad Z61t),
and I want to do some PHP development, so I looked into installing
Dreamweaver on it. I have a student license for Studio 8. Most of the
pages I pulled up with Google show that installing Dreamweaver 8 on
Ubuntu is pretty easy. You can right-click the installer .exe and run it
with WINE (after you install WINE, if necessary). I didn’t do it, but
I’m impressed. Nowadays it’s getting easier and easier to use Linux.
Unfortunately, wireless is still tricky. I did get WPA-PSK to work, but
it was a little tricky, even on the latest version of Ubuntu. (But
that’s another story.)
Anyway, I was also interested in finding a Linux alternative to
Dreamweaver, and I found an editor called Bluefish. You can download it
from the official
Bluefish website, and it’s available for many platforms. It looks excellent, though I haven’t used it extensively yet (but here’s a good
review of Bluefish).
The thing I really wanted was the ability to edit remote files
directly, as I did with Dreamweaver. Usually this is over FTP, but you
can use other protocols like SFTP too.
It was hard to figure out how to directly open a remote file. Inside Bluefish, there’s an option that says “Open URL…” That’s
not what you want. You actually want to use Ubuntu’s built-in
Places to connect to your remote site. At the top, choose Places, then
Connect to Server… Once the remote location is mounted, you can simply open files in Bluefish.
Awesome!
This is actually much better than the Windows way, IMHO, where you’d
actually have to do your FTP settings inside of Dreamweaver instead of
the OS. Thanks, Ubuntu/Bluefish!
