I’ve tried several times to install Zend Studio on my MacBook Pro and each time it has failed horribly, usually killing my computer. The issue was brought up at a recent PHP conference I attended and no one seemed to have an answer. Working from home today, I took a few minutes to figure it out and get it working.

Lee, a work associate, pointed out that it may just be the installer that doesn’t work and from reading several blog posts and such, that seems to be the case. The easy workaround is to make sure you’re running the latest release of Java or your intel Mac, and copy an existing install onto it. I have a G5 Tower at work and copying my Zend directory over to my MacBook worked perfectly. It seems the only problem is that the debugging doesn’t work, but that could easily be resolved by installing Zend Platform (free for developers) on the local machine (if it works) and running debugging through the local server rather than the internal binaries. For now I have to get back to work so I’ll play more another day and post regarding my success.