If you are looking to run Flex Builder 2 on Linux, see my original post.

I’ve made two minor updates for people using Flex Builder 2 on Linux. The first is to eliminate the annoying “Incorrect flash player installed…you have 0.0.0.0, and need 9.0.0.0″ that pops up every time you run a project. To fix it:

1. Download debugui.jar
2. Overwrite the file eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ui_2.0.155577/debugui.jar with the downloaded one

The second minor update: I’ve noticed some very annoying bugs in the linux flash player (all reported to Adobe now of course), but in the mean time, I’ve been using the windows flash player under WINE, which does not have the same bugs. If you want to do this (which will probably greatly reduce performance), all you really need is to:

1. Make sure you have WINE installed correctly
2. Download the windows standalone projector debugger
3. Write a wrapper script that calls wine on the windows .exe, this wrapper will then be called by flex builder. You can see my sampe script to start (it’s very simple, just need to adjust for your paths/filenames).

In other news, I’m working on my first AS3 application that is above the tech-demo level! Well…so far haven’t gotten much, but I’ve got code that compiles on both Linux Flex Builder 2, as well as Windows FlashDevelop, with no changes (yay!). You can see what I have so far, but not it’s not very exciting yet.

UPDATE! Official Flex Builder 3 for Linux!!
Check it out here!

The stuff below is left here for posterity’s sake…but you probably want the link above, and forget everything below…

With a bit of tweaking, I’ve gotten Flex Builder 2.01 working under Linux. Everything seems to work, including debugging, except for the Design view.

Here is a brief outline:

1. Download and extract Eclipse. I used Eclipse SDK 3.2.2 NOTE: I could not get it to work when eclipse was installed in /usr. Unless you can figure it out, do not install eclipse via your OS, simply download the .tgz and extract it to your home directory.
2. Download and extract the free Flex 2.01 SDK.
3. Download and install the Flex Charting Components (same link as above) Run the installer by java -jar flex_charting_2_installer.jar and install it to the root of your Flex2 SDK directory.
4. Download the Flash 9 Debugging player
   1. install the plugin into your browser by running plugin/debugger/install_flash_player_9_linux/flashplayer-installer.
   2. (as root) copy standalone/debugger/flashplayer to /usr/local/bin
   3. create a symlink for gflashplayer, (as root) ln -s /usr/local/bin/flashplayer /usr/local/bin/gflashplayer
5. Download the FlexBuilder 2.01 Plugin for Linux (mirror)
   1. Extract this to the root eclipse install folder. It will create files in the configuration, plugins, and features directories which are already part of eclipse.
   2. Open eclipse/configuration/com.adobe.flexbuilder/flexbuilder2.xml and change the value of <sdkpath> to point to the root directory where you installed the Flex 2 SDK
6. (OPTIONAL) Fix the annoying ‘Incorrect flash player installed’ popup every time you run your project:
   1. Download debugui.jar
   2. Overwrite the file eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ui_2.0.155577/debugui.jar with the downloaded one
7. (OPTIONAL) Use the windows flash player with WINE instead of native linux flash player.
   1. Make sure you have WINE installed correctly
   2. Download the windows standalone projector debugger (see link at top for player downloads)
   3. Download this flashplayer script and place in your path, as well as rename the linux player so it doesn’t interfere. You probably still need the symlink to gflashplayer as above.
8. (OPTIONAL) If you already use eclipse, it’s possible it wont see the new Flex plugins. Simply run the following command to get eclipse to search for your newly installed stuff:
   1. “./eclips -clean”

That should be it! The only problem I’ve had is switching to design view messes everything up. Just stay in source view and you’ll be fine. Also, whenever I try to debug, it says I don’t have flash 9 installed, but I just press continue, and debugging works like normal (catching traces, breakpoint on crash, etc).

Thanks to this chinese guy’s post for figuring it out. He has a few more posts on the issue ([1], [2]), but I didn’t seem to need any of the info in them.

Somewhat related, this post talks about other ways of using Flex 2 / AS3 under linux.

This is another fairly quick app I wrote, it pulls the posts from senocular’s AS3 Tip of the Day thread, and then displays them in a little browser (minus all the other forum cruft). It also caches them to disk, so each tip needs to be loaded only once.

(sorry for the lame interface)

AS3Tips.air — install file, requires Apollo Alpha Runtime.
AS3Tips.mxml — source code

Thanks to senocular for writing these amazingly helpful AS3 tips!

I saw this post by Marcos P. who created an app for searching for song lyrics. I took it and added a few small enhancements:

• Download raw lyrics instead of html — saves bandwidth & time
• Better layout — I take advantage of Flex’s layout capabilities to make the interface resizable
• Partial match searching — If a song is not found, I call out to the search page in the lyrics wiki, and then parse the results. This allows to find songs if you don’t know the exact name, or miss a ‘the’, or to browse all songs by a certain artist

LyricStation.air — requires the Apollo Runtime Alpha 1 in order to use. AIR file also includes the source code.

Many thanks to Marcos for giving out the source! It’s a great learning experience to hack on other people’s code that they’ve already gotten started for you.