I haven’t been doing much Flex development lately as I’ve been busy with some other new projects. However, I did recently install the alpha of FlexBuilder under Linux, which has been out for a while now. I’ll document briefly what it took to make it run on my system.

I hadn’t been using the Linux Flex builder because getting Eclipse Europa installed under 64-bit Linux has been nothing but trouble. As I hadn’t looked at the problem in a while, I took a look at it again today and narrowed it down to a problem with the 64 bit version of the JVM which causes it to return an exit-code 13. So, I installed the 32 bit version and was able to get Europa up and running, but then the Flex Builder installer gave me the following:

# ./flexbuilder_linux_install_a2_121807.bin
Preparing to install...
Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...
Configuring the installer for this system's environment...
 
Launching installer...
 
An internal LaunchAnywhere application error has occured and this application 
cannot proceed. (LAX)
 
Stack Trace:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Malformed \uxxxx encoding.
        at java.util.Properties.loadConvert(Properties.java:552)
        at java.util.Properties.load0(Properties.java:375)
        at java.util.Properties.load(Properties.java:325)
        at 
com.zerog.common.java.util.PropertiesUtil.loadProperties(DashoA8113)
        at com.zerog.lax.LAX.<init>(DashoA8113)
        at com.zerog.lax.LAX.main(DashoA8113)

After doing some research on the above error, I was able to discover that it rely’s on my PS1 prompt (eg. the command prompt that I use: “user@host:~#”), so I reran the installer as:

# PS1=">" ./flexbuilder_linux_install_a2_121807.bin

Changing the prompt allowed it to proceed, but as my root account uses a default prompt (in this case on Ubuntu), it’s probably something many people will run into.

Since the installer doesn’t recognize JAVA_HOME (bad installer!), I went ahead and set the PATH to the 32-bit JVM, per the docs, and restarted the installer a second time after which I was finally able to install Eclipse.

Even after it was installed, however, I still didn’t have any flex options within Eclipse. After poking around, I noticed that none of the plugins or features were installed in the eclipse directory, so I symlinked the plugins and features subdirectories into their corresponding eclipse folders, after which it finally installed.

The ./Adobe_Flex_builder.sh script had quite a few problems, so it wasn’t an option:

$ ./Adobe_Flex_builder.sh
Standalone player is available under and will be used from
/usr/local/pkg/flexbuilder-a2/Player/linux/flashplayer
grep: /usr/local/pkg/flexbuilder-a2/Player/linux/fp_installerout.txt: No such 
file or directory
Plugin flash player is available under  -   and the same is set to 
MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH
./Adobe_Flex_builder.sh: 73: cannot create temp.txt: Permission denied
./Adobe_Flex_builder.sh: 74: cannot create temp1.txt: Permission denied
cat: temp1.txt: No such file or directory
 
./Adobe_Flex_builder.sh: 93: /eclipse: not found

I already have the debug flash player installed, so I shouldn’t need to
install it a second time. Also note that the installer wouldn’t even let me
try to install it as I’m running a 64-bit system, so “fp_installerout.txt”
isn’t going to exist.

But, after all that, it works now. I now have FlexBuilder running on Linux!