In this post I'm going to write about how to run Zend Studio 5.5 on FreeBSD 6.2. FreeBSD isn't officially supported by Zend therefore you can't use their support.

I'm using the trial version of Zend Studio 5.5 and I think I will buy it soon. It's the best PHP IDE that I've tried. Who knows the PHP better than the folks at Zend :-)

OK, let's start...

I assume that you have correctly installed xwindows and your favorite windows manager. I'm using Xorg 7.2 and KDE 3.5.7.

First we need to download the Zend Studio from Zend. If you are not already registered on Zend website, you will have to register. Only registered users can download products from their website.

I saved it to the /home/majlo/ZendStudio-5_5_0a.tar.gz. We need to unpack it and execute.

kevin# tar xzf ZendStudio-5_5_0a.tar.gz
kevin# sh ZendStudio-5_5_0.bin

We get an error that this binary type is not known. This is because we don't have installed Linux compatibility.

ELF binary type „0“ not known

We need to install linux base from ports.

kevin# cd /usr/ports/emulators/linux_base-fc4/
kevin# make install clean

This installation will also load linux module to the kernel. To load linux module on system start add this line to /etc/rc.conf.

linux_enable="YES"

Next attempt to start installation.

kevin# cd /home/majlo/
kevin# sh ZendStudio-5_5_0.bin

We get another error:

Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM warning: Can't detect initial thread stack location – find vma failed
'SWING' UI not supported by VM. Reverting to AWT.

We need linux xorg libraries.

kevin# cd /usr/ports/x11/linux-xorg-libs/
kevin# make install clean

OK. Now we can successfully start the installation wizard. I will install Zend Studio into /usr/local/Zend/ZendStudio-5.5.0.

kevin# cd /home/majlo/
kevin# sh ZendStudio-5_5_0.bin

When the installation finish we can start Zend Studio from /usr/local/Zend/ZendStudio-5.5.0/bin/ZDE but after the "Tip of the Day..." it stop responding and after few minutes it crash. This can be resolved by modification the ZDE file.

kevin# cd /usr/local/Zend/ZendStudio-5.5.0/bin/
kevin# mv ZDE ZDE.bak
kevin# cat ZDE.bak | sed 's/jitOnOrOff=on/jitOnOrOff=off/' > ZDE
kevin# chmod 755 ZDE

Now we can successfully start and use Zend Studio on FreeBSD. (It may take a while to load.)

kevin# ./ZDE

We now have running Zend Studio on FreeBSD. But I'm Slovak and I need to write Slovak national characters in Zend Studio and when I tried, it doesn't work. After spending days searching the Internet I've found that the solution is really simple. Just add this line to your ~/.cshrc file and reboot.

setenv LC_ALL sk_SK.ISO8859-2

We can now use Zend Studio on FreeBSD with Slovak keyboard :-)