Installing and using Komodo Edit on Ubuntu 18.04

Introduction

For coding, vim is a great tool on Linux systems, but when you are used to Active State Komodo Edit tool on Windows system with its ability to define projects, workspaces… you may want to run Komodo Edit on Ubuntu and forward the graphical interface to a Windows 10 client.

Active State Komodo Edit can be installed and executed on an Ubuntu system and the graphical interface forwarded to a Windows 10 client with X11 forwarding. The pre-requisites and the installation are quite easy, here they are.

Pre-requisites

X11 forwarding

Enable X11 forwarding from Ubuntu server to Windows 10 (SSH / XMing).

More details about this procedure is available in the article "Ubuntu, how to display server windows on Windows 10 client hosts with Putty and XMing Server".

gtk 2

The package gtk 2.0 is mandatory. If this package is not installed, the installation displays a severe warning :

install: warning: It appears that either your system does not have gtk-2.0 installed,
or your system’s version of gtk-2.0 is not up to date.
Komodo requires version 2.24 or greater. Please update gtk-2.0.
While Komodo will still install correctly, it may not run.
This diagnostic is not fool-proof. If you are sure the package is
installed and up to date, you may safely ignore this warning.
Proceed? [y/N]

As root, install gtk 2.0 packages (approximately 460 MB disk space needed):

root@vps% apt-get install gtk2.0

Firefox

Active State Komodo Edit relies a lot on Mozilla librairies. When Mozilla librairies are not installed, running Komodo Edit fails and reports that the library libdbus-glib-1.so.2 is missing :

libdbus-glib-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Couldn't load XPCOM.

The easiest way is to install Firefox (approximately 185 MB disk space needed). With Firefox, all mozilla dependant librairies will be installed. As user root :

root@vps% apt-get install firefox
          
...
The following additional packages will be installed:
  libcanberra0 libdbus-glib-1-2 libdbusmenu-glib4 libdbusmenu-gtk3-4 libstartup-notification0
  libtdb1 libvorbisfile3 sound-theme-freedesktop xul-ext-ubufox...

Komodo Edit installation

Download Komodo Edit 64 bits for Linux (Linux x86_64 in the web page).

The downloaded file is a compressed archive (Komodo-Edit-11.1.1-18206-linux-x86_64.tar.gz). Uncompress the archive in a temporary directory, no need to be root for the installation, using the future account that will be the owner of the Komodo Edit distribution is enough (here the account tools) :

tools@vps% cd /tmp

tools@vps% tar -xzvf Komodo-Edit-11.1.1-18206-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Then run install.sh

tools@vps% cd Komodo-Edit-11.1.1-18206-linux-x86_64

tools@vps% ./install.sh

The installation is very easy, just need to specify the target directory for the installation :

Enter directory in which to install Komodo. Leave blank and
press 'Enter' to use the default [~/Komodo-Edit-11].
Install directory: /software/tools/komodo-edit-11

install: warning: did not install desktop shortcut: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/share/applications/komodo-edit-11.desktop'
(a Komodo .desktop file has been created in '/software/tools/komodo-edit-11/share/desktop/komodo-edit-11.desktop'
that you may install manually)

==============================================================================
Komodo Edit 11 has been successfully installed to:
    /software/tools/komodo-edit-11
...

Running Komodo Edit

For all accounts that will need to run Komodo Edit, update the environment variable $PATH to add the directory bin of Komodo Edit installation

golang@vps% export PATH=/software/tools/komodo-edit-11/bin:$PATH

and then simply run komodo in nohup mode, and that’s all.

golang@vps% komodo &

For each user needing Komodo Edit, apply this update directly in the file $HOME/.profile of the account :

$HOME/.profile

if [ -d "/software/tools/komodo-edit-11" ] ; then
    PATH="/software/tools/komodo-edit-11/bin:$PATH"
fi

About permissions, all files, directories… are created with the context of the user running KomodoEdit.