I have a Dreamweaver/XAMPP setup on my XP Pro partition that I use to develop a basic PHP/CSS website. I like Dreamweaver for it's tag/element auto-completion and immediate preview ability. The immediate preview really helps, since I am just learning CSS.

In order to get the same functionality on Jaunty, which Dreamweaver replacement do you recommend?

I have tried KompoZer, but for some strange reason it won't accept .php files. I have tried Quanta Plus, but it doesn't appear to have immediate preview--same with Bluefish. Should I try to run Dreamweaver in wine? Any suggestions? Thank you all very much in advance!

If your setup really is for development, you should have no problem using Quanta Plus or any of the KDE editors to edit your source over FTP/SFTP or directly on the local filesystem - just have a browser open in another window or on another virtual desktop to test your work - that's how I do it.

Jaunty out of the box probably requires a lot of work to get my favorite KDE combo of Quanta Plus/Kate/KWrite installed, because they will require the KDE base and utilities which are not present by default, so jEdit looks like a good alternative - find it in the Synaptic Package Manager under Programming.

Also, since you mentioned CSS as something whose support you appreciate in Dreamweaver, I would venture to say that in the process of web developing, using an editor and viewing in a web browser is the most effective way to test your code. This is because you should be testing in multiple main-stream browsers to ensure the highest likelihood that your pages are rendered as you have intended in all of these browsers. I recommend Firefox with several web developer add-ons, including the Web Developer Toolbar, and Firebug, to test your site initially, but you should also test in Internet Explorer 6-8, Opera, and Safari, and on as many platforms (Windows XP, Vista, 7; Linux; Mac OS X 10.4-5) as you can.

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Dreamweaver & wine should work perfectly if that is what you want.

Geek, I truly appreciate the thoughtfulness of your reply. It sounds like the best option is to get a local test server running with Quanta. I may also just install all the KDE stuff because it's not worth downloading and installing Kubuntu from scratch.

Jay73, I will try running Dreamweaver under wine just for kicks. If it works, it's good to know I have that option.

Once again, thank you so much for your helpfulness! Cheers,

Austin

Follow-up question: I assume the best way to test IE6-8 (and OSX, whatever) from Jaunty is on a VM. Any suggestions for good VM software?

virtualbox, vmware, qemu (I personally like vmware - but it just my personal opinion

Virtualbox is good although I prefer vmware because it offers more options (multi-core, USB, DirectX). Both the vmware player and server are free. Player is less CPU intensive than Server but it is hardly adequate for creating new images in a hassle-free fashion. Unlike virtualbox, it cannot be installed straight from the repositories though; you'll need to download the installer directly from the vmware site.

I have heard good things about vmware. I will check it out. Thanks again!

P.S. jay, love the sig!

I'm a newbie in the Linux world, but here's what I did to solve the Dreamweaver issue (and you should know that I do all my web editing via direct coding. The visual aspect of dreamweaver isn't worth using, IMHO.):

I have a laptop with Vista and Dreamweaver and a desktop with Ubuntu (JJ). Ubuntu has Apache 2.x and PHP 5.x on it. Then I installed NFS on Ubuntu, and now I can edit in Dreamweaver using the site root on Ubuntu. So I just have to refresh the browser after saving a file and I can see all my changes live.

I don't have to transfer files or set up a share folder or anything like that. Dreamweaver saves directly into my public_html folder on Ubuntu/Apache.

This probably isn't the best solution for a public server, but my Ubuntu system is not publicly visible, so it doesn't open any security issues.

The beautiful part is that everything gets to run on its native platform.

db