This should be added to a FAQ somewhere. Took me ages to figure it out on my own, especially since the error msg is so generic -> http://pig-rabbit.com/tmux-and-launchctl
Substituting launchd is easily done with any process launcher of your choice. As for the .dev TLD trick - that's a little harder, as OS X 10.6 has support for flat files inside /etc/resolver/* which the name of the file indicates what configuration/settings to use when resolving that domain. As such, they just drop a file named 'dev' in there and tell it to look to localhost on a custom port for DNS resolution. Then they run a mini DNS server on that port to resolve .dev domains to localhost.
Probably the only way to do something similar to this for linux would be to run a name server of your own on your box and add a custom zone configuration for the .dev TLD and recursive lookup for anything else.
Yea this is interesting, with a little fiddling I was able to get the webserver up. It's not picking up my app yet. Though I'm not sure if it's because it's not being initialized or because I can't reach it due to not having the dns setup.
One of the best things about this (and other irish & co. projects)are the explanations and docs. This team always makes reading and understanding what's going on behind the scenes entertaining. It's immensely valuable to a relative newbie like myself.