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!

Subclipse is a SVN plugin for Aptana, and it allows you to interact with the SVN server from within the IDE. However getting this running properly on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine proved to be more challenging than just installing it.

The problem I was having was that when I went to talk to the SVN server, it would always ask me for my username and password, there was no option to remember it. I thought this a little strange and upon visiting the preferences dialog (Window->Preferences->Team->SVN) I was greeted by a nice error “Failed to load JavaHL library”. Which of course meant I couldn’t change any options without it bitching that it wasn’t available.

So how do we fix this? First off…

sudo apt-get install libsvn-java

Then, if you’re lucky, you should just have to restart Aptana in order for it to now detect it. However, if your machine was like mine and it didn’t detect it then you’ll need to do the following. Go to where Aptana is installed, for me this was /usr/local/aptana

cd /usr/local/aptana
gedit AptanaStudio.ini

You’ll then need to add the following line to the end of this file

-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni

That’s technically it, all you should need to do now is save the file, restart Aptana and it’ll be working for you. Well, I say you, I mean me

So now that JavaHL is installed correctly, when I next talked to the SVN server, it once again, asked me for my login details, however a lovely “Save Credentials” checkbox appeared saving my sanity from inputting my details everytime.