I generally work on windows but have Ubuntu running on my laptop aswell for those times I get sick of windows and its slow booting in particular. Today I decided to try some Flex development on Ubuntu. Had a few slight problems to overcome so decided to stick the details down here in case I need them again or anyone else has similar issues. Plenty of others have been through this and I have linked to their info where appropriate.
Firstly you need the Flex 3 SDK from the adobe site. Same package for all platforms. Download it and extract it whereever you like, in my case i put it in my home directory in a flex_3_sdk folder.
If you want you can get the flex builder plugin for eclipse which I suppose is useful if you’re doing some serious scale development but I couldn’t be bothered, any text editor on my system will do the job after all flex files are just xml. I’m using the SCITE editor at the moment.
Once I have my mxml file ready I need to call the mxmlc compiler in the flex_3_sdk/bin folder. You can do this the long way e.g. ./flex_3_sdk/bin/mxmlc myflexfile.mxml
or you could just edit your bashrc to add a shortcut alias to mxmlc e.g. alias mxmlc='flex_3_sdk/bin/mxmlc myflexfile.mxml'
- now you can just call mxmlc with the filename.
Here I hit a problem I couldn’t figure out, after calling the compiler an error message appeared “Segmentation Fault - core dumped”. After a bit of googling it seems that the segmentation fault error is caused by the java runtime and thanks to this explanation and solution I saw that I needed to get the Sun Java runtime as opposed to the default one that comes with Ubuntu. The quickest way to do this was just to use the package manager to get and install the Sun Java 6 JDK and runtime. Once you have the latest Sun version installed I edited the mxmlc file to point to the new java location /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/bin/java $VMARGS -jar "$FLEX_HOME/lib/mxmlc.jar" +flexlib="$FLEX_HOME/frameworks" "$@"
And finally my flex file compiled and I got my swf which I duly opened in firefox and had the joy of seeing a label with “hello larry” on it
I’m a bit late on this but after all the What is Singularity questions Aral Balkan revealed that it’s a large scale online web conference planned for later this year. Read all about over at the Singularity08 site.
Aral is just an amazing swirl of activity and in his spare time recently he put together a flash version checker website - something that everyone looks for at some stage but never knows where to go to, well now it’s sorted!
Given that I’m planning on moving down the county from Dublin next year broadband services become very important. The whole broadband situation outside of the main urban centres is a mess and there’s no hope of the current government and minister Lying Eamon Ryan fixing it. Senator Shane Ross is putting forward a Broadband Infrastructure Bill which might help, if it were accepted and there seems to be moves to revive the Ireland-Offline lobby group to put some pressure on the people in charge.
Wireless broadband is available in a lot of places mostly thanks to Digiweb although you need to be in line of sight of a station and within a certain distance which can be a bit difficult in rural areas.
The satellite broadband is a laughable option, so laughable that I don’t think you can call it broadband, certainly not when it’s realisitcally only one way service, although at least there’s plenty of companies out there providing it and offering some relief to dial up sufferers.
What is Singularity? - I’ve no idea but it seems to be another great project involving super flasher Aral Balkan and by putting the badge and links on your site Aral says you get an early insight to it. So voila….
Just got very nostalgic as I came across the Amstrad 6128 Plus computer, the system that started my journey into the world of computers and contributed immensely to my current career path of programming. I think I was about 12 when Santa Claus delivered one and it has to have been the most significant and most used present I ever got. Everyone else at that time had their Commodore 64s and eventually their Amigas but I got years out of that Amstrad. My programming skills developed over countless hours of typing, modifying and creating BASIC programs.
It had a weird 3″ floppy disk drive that meant games were hard to come by, particularly in Laois/Kilkenny, but some of the games it did have were great, check out the version of Batman The Movie via Youtube.
Must have a root around and see if it’s still at home somewhere!
