IDM PowerTips

Run UltraEdit on FreeBSD

Note: This power tip was written and submitted by a user. While IDM is happy to make this guide available to all of our users,we cannot officially support issues in arising out of running UltraEdit on FreeBSD. Special thanks to Rick M for providing this tutorial!

Historically, it hasn’t been that easy to run UltraEdit seamlessly on FreeBSD, but with recent versions, all features (including FTP/SFTP) can be enabled. From experience, it seems to perform equally fast on FreeBSD as on Linux or Windows.

FreeBSD version: 10.2 (current stable, 64-bit)
Desktop: KDE (although it would most likely work well for any standard desktop)

1. Prepare your FreeBSD workstation for Linux compatibility:

Install packages:

  • pkg install linux-c6-base
  • pkg install linux-c6-xorg-libs

If for some reason these libraries aren’t added as dependencies, install them too:

  • pkg install linux-c6-libssh2
  • pkg install linux-c6-openssl
  • pkg install linux-c6-openssl-compat

Add to /etc/rc.con:
linux_enable=”YES”

Add to /boot/loader.con:
linux_load=”YES”

Add to /etc/fstab:
linprocfs /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0

2. Reboot FreeBSD

3. Get the UltraEdit for Linux generic tar package (32-bit version)

You can download it here.

4. Unpack tar at any location of your choosing

For example, /home/joe_user/uex

5. Set up shell script

Make a small shell script: /home/joe_user/bin/uex with the contents:

#!/compat/linux/bin/bash
PATH=$PATH:/compat/linux/bin:/compat/linux/usr/bin
/home/joe_user/uex/bin/uex

(Don’t forget to chmod 755 /home/joe_user/bin/uex and run the rehash command if you are in tcsh)

6. Run UltraEdit

Execute uex & from the command line, or add a KDE menu entry pointing to /home/joe_user/bin/uex (you’ll even get the UltraEdit icon).

That should be all it takes! If you have any additional problems or comments, post on the forum topic for this here.