Os Incompatibility

[aspnetguy]

My desktop machine dual boots Ubuntu 9.04 and XP. I do my development work in Ubuntu and only use XP for games.I recently got a laptop with Vista.So I developed a small PHP application in Ubuntu using Netbeans 6.5 and then uploaded it to a Linux server.Last night I noticed a small rendering (HTML/CSS) bug. I was on my laptop so I FTPed the file to my laptop, opened it with Notepad2 and added a couple of BR tags to fix the bug and FTPed it back to the server.When I refreshed the page it gave me a PHP error saying it found an unexpected $end on line 1 (which is a require_once statement).My laptop had Netbeans 6.7 so I opened the file in that and tried to solve the problem. Every PHP statement was closed ({ }) and every string had the closing quotes. I could comment out certain lines and have the page render (with errors of course). It seemed random. Sometimes commenting out a line would work other times commenting the same line didn't work.After 30 minutes I got angry and gave up. I went to my desktop and opened the same file in Netbeans 6.5 in Ubuntu, added the same BR tags and uploaded to the server and everything worked fine.So I am left to conclude that the problem was an incompaitibily with Ubuntu and Vista, Netbeans 6.5 and 6.7, or Netbeans 6.5 and Notepad2. This is very wierd, has anyone else experienced anything like this? I am currently considering my OS options (I really need to pare down).I like Vista more than XP (my laptop has 4GB or ram so it is not a problem) but I can't get my printer to work in Vista (5 year old printer). I have considered putting Ubuntu on my laptop but on my desktop I have had problems with graphics and printing in Ubuntu and I have heard wireless and battery management can be a pain on laptops with Ubuntu.So as much as I have enjoyed Ubuntu I am actually considering moving to Vista on both machines if I can solve the printing problem. *sigh* .I can't put XP on both because I have a 32 bit copy and would only be able to 2.5GB of my ram on the laptop

[justsomeguy]

That's odd, you normally don't see that stuff with text files. I haven't seen that before, but the things I'd check for would be character encoding issues or you might even want to open the file with a hex editor and see if there are any null characters near the beginning. It might use a null character or sequence as the "end of file" marker, and either the text editor or OS might be throwing in a null for some reason.

[aspnetguy]

Thanks, I'll take a look at that. I thought that was really odd too.

[aspnetguy]

I just checked FileZilla and the chgaracter encoding is set to auto so maybe Ubuntu and Vista use different encodings by default which messed things up.