If your update fails with an error along the lines of "could not remove directory {your_sts_dir}/dropins" then as the bug link above states, just create an empty file in that directory and it'll work (I just did 'touch foo' to get something in there).

Supposedly this issue will be fixed in the next release. Hopefully I can update to that one to find out. ;-)

In my previous post about Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition I pointed out there are some issues with the menus in some applications, which in my case I ran into with Eclipse (actually SpringSource Tool Suite). I posted to the Ubuntu Forums and in no time a kind user pointed me to this bug report (which I somehow missed in my searches before posting to the forums), and also provided the fix for the issue which is simple enough. Basically you just have to tell Ubuntu not to use its own menus when you start the application, so from a terminal you do this to start the app:

UBUNTU_MENUPROXY= /home/mwoodward/sts/STS

Note that there is a space after the equals sign. Of course if you're having this issue with another application you'd just substitute the path to that application where I have /home/mwoodward/sts/STS And you can obviously throw this into a launcher script so you don't have to remember to type this every time.

I was also having problems with the menus on UltraEdit so I was happy to see this fix resolved those issues as well. With a workaround for this issue I now give the Unity interface a grade of a nice solid B as opposed to the C I gave it in my previous post. There are still some quirks here and there but at least now I can use STS without any issue.

I'm always amazed, yet never surprised, at the excellent support available from the community of free software projects. With commercial software you pay for support, and in my experience it isn't very good as a rule, but with free software you have legions of users at the ready to help other users, and you can also pay for commercial support if you so need or desire.

What's not to love?

If you use Eclipse and Subclipse, chances are you've see the "Subversion Native Library Not Available" error (see attached pic). Things tend to work fine even if you see that error (at least they did for me), but I finally took the time the other night to get to the bottom of it and fix it in the easiest way possible.

First, do this:

sudo apt-get install libsvn-java

Next, do this:

sudo cp /usr/lib/jni/* /usr/lib

Now I said "easiest way possible" above because you can monkey around with eclipse.ini -VMARGS and all sorts of other nonsense, but chances are none of those solutions will work if you actually want to use a launcher to launch Eclipse.

So do yourself a favor, drop the files where Eclipse expects to find them, and get on with your life. (As you can tell, I spent more time on this than I wanted to, so I'm simply trying to help others avoid this same fate.)

I finally felt like I was at a point with projects, etc. that I could try CFEclipse this week. When I want to try a new piece of software (or when I switched from the PC to the Mac for example), I always try to give it a real try, meaning I abandon my old tool/program/computer/what have you and only use the new tool for an entire week. So this week I shut down Dreamweaver MX 2004 and fired up CFEclipse to see how it would go.

I have to admit this wasn't my absolute first time using Eclipse, but I'd only really dabbled before or used it when I was doing some Java stuff (for which Dreamweaver is absolutely horrendous). I really love some of the features so I was pretty sure I'd take right to it, but you never know until you cut the cord and only use the new tool.

When I did this one-week trial with a Mac I never went back to a PC and it's looking like this is going to be the case with CFEclipse as well. I kept expecting there would be several "I wish I could do X like I did in Dreamweaver," but it didn't happen once, and there's a lot CFEclipse has going for it over Dreamweaver. I won't go into this in detail since you've probably read about CFEclipse before in other blogs; this entry is more just to serve as one more CFer singing its praises and to be counted amongst the converted.

Couple things I noticed.

• The colored syntax-highlighting doesn't always update properly. This is apparently a known issue so I'm sure it will be fixed shortly.


• When I open XML files they don't seem to have syntax highlighting (it's all black text). Probably a setting I just need to dig for.

That really is pretty much it, believe it or not! The one huge thing I'd love to see that I also know is in the works is the ability to FTP right from the file browser. That's the one thing I miss from Dreamweaver, but the rest of Eclipse is good enough that I'll live without it for a while.

I'll still be using Dreamweaver on my PC for work because we do a lot with Contribute and use Dreamweaver templates pretty heavily, but when I'm doing my own stuff or doing coding that doesn't involve DW templates, CFEclipse has definitely become my main IDE. Time to start digging deeper and seeing what other cool Eclipse plugins there are out there ...

Kudos to Spike and the whole CFEclipse team--keep up the fantastic work!

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