Flex on Linux is hard work
03.08.09Filed Under: Flex
I have for some time been running Ubuntu on my work-at-home-computer. Having to work with Flex on Linux is a constant struggel and I can understand why most people would just give up. I can see that the number of Flex developers on Linux is quite small, however I think it’s a shame that we’re pretty much left on our own. I don’t know if Flash Builder will ever make it onto Linux. However I have been able to get some work done with Flex Builder on Linux. There are however a few difficulties which I thought would be of interest to others.
Flash Player Debug version
I don’t know why this is so damn hard, but for me (and according to Google quite a few other people as well) this was a hard job. First off you need to download the debug version. Then some posts say that all you need is to override the libflashplayer.so file in ~/mozilla/plugins/. For me however this only resulted in the debug version being there the first time I launch my Flex app, but only once. After the first launch it was back to the standard version. Not beeing to keen on figuring why this funky behaviour happened I took the bull by the horn and ran a grep for all occurences of libflashplayer.so and replaced it with the debug version. Now I have the debug version every time 
No events? No import flash.*?
When setting up a project you may get some issues with classes from the flash.* packages. Resulting in the inability to say stuff like addEventListener, which is something you really want to be able to do. You can Google for the topic and find some interesting posts. To get around it you just remove the one set up by the SDK and find the version you need in the SDK. In my case this was verison 10. Having done this all my code completion stuff worked.
I know there where a few other issues related to installing FB, but I’ve put them so far in the back of my mind that I can no longer reach them. I hope this might help some of you having problems with Flex on Linux.
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