William Brown Street

Today I decided I give the new Linux Flex Builder 3 a try, and install it in Gutsy. Now that I have a complete environment for developing nice Flash applications in Linux, first I am quite happy and couldn't have imagined this one year back and second as installation was not that straight forward as I thought I want to share my installation process here.

So first of all you need Eclipse 3.3 to get Flex Builder 3 to run properly. So for gutsy users don't install eclipse with apt-get or aptitude as in the repositories is only Eclipse 3.2. So either look for a repository with eclipse 3.3 or get yourself a tar file from eclipse.org with the latest release.

I choose to download a tar archive with eclipse 3.3 from their website. Don't think it will be difficult to set up Eclipse, because the only thing you need to do is extract the downloaded archive. I downloaded the archive to /home/<Username>/Flexbuilder/ and extracted it in this place making it then  /home/<Username>/Flexbuilder/eclipse.

Now that I have done this just go to the eclipse folder and start eclipse with ./eclipse , to check that it is running fine, and to setup a workspace.

Now get a copy of the Flex Builder and download the file to the Flexbuilder folder. Make it executable chmod +x and then start the script. ./flexbuilder_install.sh

Accept the licence, and specify the location where you want Flexbuilder to be installed. I choose /home/<Username>/Flexbuilder/Adobe_Flex_Builder, so Flex builder and eclipse are installed within the same folder. Specify the location of the eclipse you want to use together with Flex Builder.

IMPORTANT: Install the Flash Player that comes with Flex. 

Then Flex Builder install takes less then 5 minutes. So hurry if you want to get a cup of coffee. After install is done, we start Flex Builder by the command   /home/<Username>/Flexbuilder/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/Adobe_Flex_builder.sh. And you should see Eclipse Startup dialog.

When you now come to the Eclipse Workbench, you might be a little surprised or even disappointed that Eclipse still doesn't show any Flex related things. What you need to do is to switch to the Flex Development View, by selecting from Window -> Show View -> Flex Development.

So the Flex Builder is installed and you can start developing. If you run your Application, the swf movie opens in Firefox, by default. This is fine for me as I want to do web development with Flex. But to use the great power of Flex Builder, we want the Debug Mode to work properly. 

Here we now have a problem. Either we want to use the debug version of Flash that comes with Flex as Firefox plugin, so we can debug, but we won't be able to watch videos on youtube anymore.

I have chosen the following option. I leave the Firefox flash Player on the latest version. With Flex comes a standalone version of flash Debugger. (/home/<Username>/Flexbuilder/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/Player/linux) Copy the file flashplayer from this directory to /usr/local/bin. Now you should be able from the terminal to launch the standalone Flash with the command flashplayer.

Now in Eclipse, right click the Project and select Debug As -> Open Debug Dialog. Here you find the Url or Path to launch being the html files. For the Debug entry, please change to the html to swf. Now when you start in Debug mode, instead of launching Firefox, the standalone Player should open.

Finally, we will have to check Firefox (about:plugins), that it uses the Flashplayer we prefer. After my installation, Firefox used again 2 Flash Plugins, which made it really slow. So remove, or rename the libflashplayer.so to libflashplayer.so_BAK in the folder /usr/lib/firefox/plugins. So that's it. Enjoy Flash Development under Linux!!!!