If you had a previous installation of Aptana Studio in hardy and now that you’ve upgraded to ibex it no longer works then you aren’t alone. It no longer works since during the upgrade Firefox 2 was removed from your system, and there isn’t a way to put it back in as its been removed from the package manager.

Luckily the fix is easy…

sudo apt-get install xulrunner

Then you’ll need to either edit or create a startup script for Aptana to use. So make a file called “runAptana.sh” in /usr/local/aptana and inside that put…

#!/bin/bash
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/xulrunner
/usr/local/aptana/AptanaStudio

Then, whenever you want to run Aptana use that script instead; otherwise you’ll get those nasty errors which hamper your daily work efforts!

After finally giving in I decided to work out how to get Firefox 2.0.0.11 and 3.0.1 running side by side. It turned out to be much easier than I thought, so I thought I’d share this with the world (although its probably posted on about 5million other blogs), either way…

• Download Firefox 2.0.0.11 from OldVersion
• Change the installation directory to something other than the default

That’s the easy part, now for the more complex bit…

• Make sure all your Firefox windows are closed (yes, this one too)
• Start -> Run -> “firefox -ProfileManager“
• Press “Create Profile” and call the new profile “ff2“
• Once it’s created the profile press “Exit”

Now navigate to the folder you just installed Firefox 2 into, and create a shortcut to the firefox.exe

firefox.exe -P ff2 -no-remote

Put that wherever you please and then you can load Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time!