Dev App on live server

[eluser]karstyn[/eluser]
Hi All,

New to CodeIgniter and have taken over an existing project. I've been trying unsuccessfully to get an identical development installation on my laptop as the live server has. The live server is on linux and my laptop is XP, although I am using apache on port 8080 and not IIS. I have the same versions of apache and PHP on my laptop as the live server apache 2.0 and PHP 5.1.6, and have tried as much as I can to get the php.ini config file as close to the live version as I can by scanning phpinfo() for the settings. I'm even connecting to the live database for now just to cut down on one more moving piece. If I get the setup working then I can switch to a testing version of the database.

When I try to run the application locally I get a lot of bugs, and weird things like html elements, div tags, showing in form fields, page submissions break, etc.

So actually two questions -

1. Anything obvious I may be overlooking in trying to setup my development environment?

2. If I can't get a development environment to work can I have a second Application folder on the live server that I can use as a development area? I've tried a few things to get this approach to work as well, but no luck either. I've tried changing the index.php 'base_url' to include a 'dev/' sub-directory, with a full copy of CodeIgniter in dev/. Also tried changing the config settings to point the 'system' to 'dev/system' but that didn't work either. Unfortunately this is a hosted application and I don't have system level directory access.

Any ideas greatly appreciated!