I see five different areas of software that I use during development. I first, of course, need a development environment to generate my code. I need software to manipulate images that will be used in my sites. I need a program to encode videos into web friendly formats. After all of this, I need to get my files onto the web server. Lastly I need to be able to view the completed work to see how it turned out and determine where I need to tweak my code.

IDE

jEdit is my IDE of choice. I have tried others and could never find one the encompassed all of my needs. jEdit's robust module system allows enough expansion to cover almost any developers' needs. Most important of these is the FTP plugin for editing code directly on the server. The CSS auto complete feature is a nice plus too, though it was never a requirement that I had set out to find.

Image Manipulation

The GIMP is a no brainer here. It is the standard for image editing and creation in a Linux environment. A lot of people say that is severely handicapped in comparison to Photoshop. I am not a professional designer but have been able to do everything I have ever needed to do to an image with The GIMP. A legal version of Photoshop would cost me over $600, that's a cost I can't really justify for an individual – sans self-employed, professional designers. If you are into design that much, then you are probably a Mac elitist anyway – so why are you using Linux? I have found that I can almost always follow a good Photoshop tutorial I have found on the web and mimic it using The GIMP with equal results. I may have to add a couple more steps to the process, but that is fine considering I did not have to fork over any money to do it. Note: This argument does not acknowledge the option of Photoshop piracy.

Video Encoding

MPlayer's movie encoder is fast on the command line. I am able to take nearly any video format and then resize it and convert it into a Flash video. That makes it have a smaller filesize and also ensures that it will be in a format that is usable to most visitors.

File Transfer

I can edit my code directly on the server with jEdit, but I have to get my images, videos and whatever else I am delivering up on the server. gFTP is the only FTP client I have ever used in Linux. I have never found a reason to look elsewhere because it does everything I need. It allows bookmarking so I can connect to my sites with a click and get my files up.

Web Browser

Of course I use Firefox to test sites with. It is also my main browser for surfing the web. But Firefox is not representative of the users who will be visiting sites. Unfortunately most people still use Microsoft's travesty of a browser – Internet Explorer. Luckily I do not need to keep that OS available as an option on my machines just to use that broken browser. IEs4Linux is a script developed by Sérgio Lopes that enables the download and installation of IE 5, 5.5 and 6 through Wine, the Windows emulator. I do not use all of the versions of IE that he makes available, just IE 6 and 7. To get IE 7 you currently need to use the beta version of IEs4Linux.

• Kernel 2.6.20-1.2925.fc6
• ATI Radeon 200M – 128MB video card
• ATI driver 8.34.8

I referenced this post at Fedora Forum and acquired some recent source RPMs so that I could build the appropriate x86_64 RPMs for the Xgl server and a library it is dependent upon that is not available in the repositories. The forum link only supplies the x86 versions. I have archived the x86_64 versions of the RPMs here. This post assumes that you already have your ATI card working with full direct rendering using the fglrx driver. First, you need to install some package dependencies. You may or may not need these depending on your current setup. These are the packages I had to install in order to create the RPMs:

[root@localhost ~]# yum install libXfont-devel libXrandr-devel libXrender-devel
libXt-devel libfontenc-devel libdrm-devel libXaw-devel xorg-x11-xtrans-devel
libxkbfile-devel libXext-devel libXxf86misc-devel xorg-x11-util-macros libXtst-devel
libXres-devel glitz-glx-devel libdmx-devel mesa-source libselinux-devel libtool
libXinerama-devel libXxf86vm-devel

Now we need to decompress the tarball from above:

[root@localhost ~]# tar zxf xglrpmsx86_64tar.gz

And install the RPMs:

[root@localhost ~]# rpm -ivh *rpm

If everything went well, you can now install your composite window manager of choice. For Compiz, we first want to make sure there are not any latent packages installed, then we will install the new package:

[root@localhost ~]# rpm -e --nodeps compiz
error: package compiz is not installed
[root@localhost ~]# yum install compiz

For Beryl, my personal choice, run either:

[root@localhost ~]# yum install beryl-gnome

or

[root@localhost ~]# yum install beryl-kde

The above command are dependent upon which desktop environment you use. You can now logout and you should find an Xgl session available for whichever desktop environment you use. Log in to your Xgl session and start the new window manager. For Compiz, type:

[user@localhost ~]$ desktop-effects

And for Beryl, run:

[user@localhost ~]$ beryl-manager

After I confirmed that everything was running well, I added the window manager command to the startup programs. The GUI for this is available in Gnome at System->Preferences->More Preferences->Sessions, under the Startup Programs tab.

I also added the following snippet to my xorg.conf file in the Module section:

SubSection "extmod"
    Option "omit xfree86-dga"
EndSubSection

Personal Installation

At the time of this post I am using the 64-bit version of Fedora Core 6. The major prerequisite for jEdit is a Java runtime. I currently had the i386 version of JRE 1.5 installed for my 32-bit browser. I downloaded and installed the 64-bit JDK 1.5. After installation, I set up this version to be my default:

[root@localhost ~]# alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /opt/jdk1.5/bin/java 2
[root@localhost ~]# alternatives --config java

I then chose the new JDK version.

[root@localhost ~]# java -version
java version "1.5.0_11"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_11-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.5.0_11-b03, mixed mode)

Plugins

The great thing about jEdit is its Plugin Manager that lists, downloads and installs available plugins. I needed only a few options to make this IDE worthwhile. My main problem with other IDEs I had tried was the lack of FTP support – which makes web development a laborious task. The FTP plugin solved this. After installation, I docked it to the left and the beginnings of an excellent workspace. After reviewing the available plugins, I selected and am testing the following:

• Buffer Tabs
• XML
• PHP Parser
• Editor Scheme

Note: When I began writing this post, I was using jEdit version 4.3pre9. After a few days use, I became fed up with an FTP issue that causes network operations (save, open, etc.) to take an excessive amount of time. I found a patch that was available but didn’t want to mess with it, so I downloaded and installed version 4.3pre8 and am not experiencing that issue anymore.