BrokenBlog

You can now own your very own Debian/Ubuntu (.deb), Redhat/Fedora (.rpm) or Slackware (.tgz) packages for the Flex 2 SDK. The catch? You have to make them yourself, but at least it’s as easy as moving some couple files around.

This can generate three packages, one for the Flex 2 SDK, another for the native (GTK) standalone Flash debug player, and yet another for a wine-powered standalone Flash debug player. I’ve only tested this on Ubuntu (Debian) so any information on how well it works with other distros would be nice.

Step 1: Get checkinstall

The script I wrote for this job uses checkinstall, you should be able to get this program using your favorite package management software.

Step 2: Gather the files

• Download these files and unpack them somewhere. It has several folders that you need move files into.
• Download the Flex 2 SDK, and unpack these files into the folder named flex-2.0.1 that came with those files.
• If you want the native player, download the Linux Flash players and extract the file located in flash_player_9_linux_dev/standalone/debugger/flashplayer.tar.gz to the flex-saflashplayer folder. You should have a file named flashplayer there now.

Step 3: Make packages

Either just double-click the create-packages.sh file or open a terminal, navigate to your working folder, and run this command…
./create-packages.sh
Any arguments you add to create-packages.sh will be passed to checkinstall, so you can use arguments like -D (force Debian), -R (force RPM) and -S (force Slackware).

Before each package is created you’ll be presented with some details, you can adjust these settings or simply press enter to continue. Once you’re done you’ll have two or three packages.

Step 4: Install

Install the packages using whatever method is available to you, double-clicking being the obvious choice. On Debian/Ubuntu you can run this command…
dpkg -i *.deb
to install them all.

Epilogue

Now that you’re done, type mxmlc, fdb, compc, or asdoc in the command line and bask in it’s glory.

The Flash debugger will use whatever Flash debug player is installed, but if you install both, then the native player will be used by default. If you want to pick, then type this into the command line…
sudo update-alternatives --config flex2-flashplayer
and pick one of the choices. Personally, I feel the wine-powered player is more stable, but it’s a little slower.

I can’t figure out how to include the Flex Ant Tasks as a package because (at least on Ubuntu) Eclipse has it’s own folder for Ant libraries (most of which are symbolic links to the actual files in ant’s library folder) which I don’t know how to reference. Eclipse is kinda screwy on Ubuntu, so I guess that’s to be expected.

All the Flex files are located in /usr/lib/flex, so use that as your FLEX_HOME variable if you continue using the Flex Ant Tasks.

I also can’t figure out how to set FLEX_HOME globally, since editing /etc/profile seems out of the question. For now I use wrapper scripts to set FLEX_HOME if it isn’t already set, but if anybody has any better ideas, email me.