How to install Flex Builder 3 alpa 5 for Linux in Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) (64bit OS)?

This goes alongside some sources (linked in the post) and adds some notes that I found necessary. It just relates to installing Flex Builder on a 64bit operating system; for 32bit Linux, there is another article on this site. Especially, one source was Adobe’s instruction set for installing on 64bit Linux.

Installation procedure

1. We need to create a clean environment. Only if you never had Eclipse 3.5 installed on your system, you can jump over this.
   • rm -R ~/.eclipse/org.eclipse.platform_3.5.0_*/ (Omitting this can cause all Flex perspectives, editors and views to be “hidden” even though Flex Builder 3 alpha 5 for Linux is correctly installed. This happens if a previous failed / wrong installation caused this stuff to be hidden, as the directory deleted above then stores that configuration, seemingly.)
   • Delete your Eclipse 3.5 installation folder and your Flex Builder for Linux installation folder, if you have previous, failed installation attempts.
2. Install Eclipse 3.5 Galileo 32bit. You will want to use a tarball for installing locally, to not mess up with a 64bit version that you might already have installed via your package manager. So you need the “Eclipse IDE for Java Developers (92 MB)”, version 3.5.1, for Linux, 32bit. To install it, unpack it e.g. to /usr/local/share/applications/eclipse-3.5.1-32bit/.
3. Install the 32bit version of the Sun Java JRE 1.5.x or newer. For that, on Ubuntu, simply install ia32-sun-java6-bin and all its dependencies.
   (Generic solution for other distros: I downloaded the file jre-6u17-linux-i586.bin from here. Found on the index of all Java downloads. And installed it to the directory /usr/local/lib/sun-java-jre-1.6.0.17-32bit/.)
4. To run the Flex Builder installer, we need to temporarily make the “java” command point to the 32 bit version. So set the environment variable PATH such that the 32-bit version of Java (installed above) is run by default. For me it was export PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun/bin:$PATH). Verify that you set the PATH right by running “java -version”. The output must be the same as that of “/usr/local/lib/sun-java-jre-1.6.0_17-32bit/bin/java -version”.
5. In the configuration file eclipse.ini add the line -vm so that the 32-bit JVM is definitely picked up when Eclipse is launched. In my case here it is editing /usr/local/share/applications/eclipse-3.5.1-32bit/eclipse.ini and adding the following before the -vmargs line [reason]:
   -vm
   /usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun/bin/java
6. Install Flex Builder for Linux alpha 5: download the file flexbuilder_linux_install_a5_112409.bin, make it executable and run it.
7. Create a small wrapper shell script in your PATH to start Flex Builder. In my case, I created /usr/local/bin/flexbuilder, made it executable and added the following content:
   #!/bin/bash
   cd /usr/local/share/applications/flexbuilder_3alpha5/;
   ./Adobe_Flex_builder.sh;
8. Installing the Flash Debug Player: In the official instructions from Adobe and also in the Flex builder installation process they say that you need to install Firefox 32bit to get FlexBuilder running. This seems to be not true; the 32bit Firefox is just mentioned there as a prerequisite for the Flash Player 9 32bit Debug that comes with Flex Builder. But it is also possible to install a 32bit Flash Player (even version 10) into a 64bit Firefox via nspluginwrapper; in my case, I successfully worked along the script in this post, just adapting the download link to install Flash Player 10 32bit Debug instead of the normal Flash Player 10 32bit. (Note / correction: as of 2010-05-09, there is no Flash Player 10 64bit Debug for Linux yet, just the normal Flash Player 10 64bit (which we don’t want for development purposes).)

So from now on, you can run Flex Builder by running the command “flexbuilder” as any user.

Fixing it up

The remaining steps are to deal with some pesky problems that pop up because we are running in Eclipse 3.5 (while only Eclipse 3.3 is officially supported by Flex Builder for Linux 3 Alpha 5).

1. Update your Flex SDK to Flex 4 beta 2 SDK, and update AIR. Use the stage 3 instructions here and follow the “To use Flex 4 SDK” steps here.
2. Apply James Ward’s ProblemManager patch (steps 2,3,4,5). A preliminary solution is to switch off warnings in the “project properties -> Flex compiler” settings. I have a more detailed description of the problem to solve here.
3. Apply Danyuls patch:
   • Download Danyul’s patch from here and unpack it.
   • Delete the directory /usr/local/share/applications/flexbuilder_3alpha5/eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.204732.
   • Delete the file /usr/local/share/applications/flexbuilder_3alpha5/eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.204732.jar.
   • Unpack the replacements from Danyul’s patch: cd /usr/local/share/applications/flexbuilder_3alpha5/eclipse/plugins/; tar -zxf eclipse-galileo-fbl-patch.tar.gz; mv eclipse-galileo-fbl-patch/eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.* .; rm -R eclipse-galileo-fbl-patch*;
4. Optionally: There is an issue that can prohibit opening the ActionScript editors, written about in more detail here. Interesting enough, while I had it in my 32bit install, it did not appear in the 64bit install here. But prophylaxis does not hurt: open the file ${ECLIPSE_3.5_32BIT_DIR}/links /com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.linux.link and prepend the content with “path=” (omitting the quotation marks).

Remaining problems

• It seems that you cannot install any new software into this Eclipse installation. That is, you can install it and it will show up in the “What is installed?” software list, but you will not find any part of the new software elsewhere in the Eclipse UI. Cleaning the workspace (eclipse -clean) and creating a new workspace (and importing the old projects there) does not help. Deleting the settings directory for this Eclipse instance in ~/.eclipse/ did not help (there is one subdir per instance in that). There is an error “ProvisioningEventBus could not be obtained. Metadata caches may not be cleaned up properly.” however in the Error Log view.
• Some buttons may still need the Enter key to trigger them, the mouse is not enough …
• There can be issues on some systems with the debugger always diconnecting after some 20-60s. The best ways to work around this that I found are:
  • Develop your Flash application in parallel as an AIR application from the same, shared code base (creating an AIR project with an added source path that points to the Flash project). Because, the debugger disconnects only from the Flash Player, not from AIR applications.
  • Or, set up a Windows XP virtual machine with VirtualBox, use NAT for the virtual network interface to make it accessible from your Linux host, and install a Flash Debug Player within the virtual machine. You can then run the code to debug therein, and use the debugger of your FlexBuilder Linux application. Works that way flawlessly with me, but takes many resources (4 GiB of RAM are sometimes a bit low for that).