art, life and software development

Having gone through the travails of setting up LinuxMint. I say travails because despite the ease of install process, it took a prayer to get the damned thing to install. It shut down my computer so many times when it was about 98% complete, forcing me to do it all again. I often wondered if the struggle was really worth the effort. Finally it went through and as shown in the previous post I had the LinuxMint OS. There were of course a few more crashes as I muddled my way through updates and so on. Now the big challenge installing the new Flex Builder Linux Public Alpha. The first thing required was to get Eclipse Europa, this has to be downloaded and installed from the Eclipse site because the version thats built into LinuxMint as a choice of installable software does not support FlexBuilder 3. LinuxMint has a wonderful util called and Archive manager. Download the Eclipse Europa tar.gz and use the archive Manager to put it at the location of your choice on your hard drive, mine was /ayo/eclipse. Once that is done download your Flex Builder Linux Public Alpha .bin file. When the download is done, open the folder you downloaded the .bin, go to the Terminal from that folder and type

chmod +x Flexbuilder_blah_blah.bin

Click 'Enter', then type

./Flexbuilder_blah_blah.bin

Click 'Enter' again.
This will bring up the FlexBuilder installer. Follow the instructions and "Bob's your uncle". This version of FlexBuilder does not offer a Design View. This is unfortunate, nonetheless there you go, FlexBuilder 3 for Linux on LinuxMint Daryna.

I've just about had it with the Windows OS. Breakdowns, slow processing and response times, my smug friends with their Macs, constant patching to improve stability, ugly interfaces, a constant need to purchase Firewalls and Antivirus software, my smug friends with their Macs (Yes, I know I said that before). AAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!! While some of my favourite IDE's and software run on WIndows and all my development life has been on WIndows, I really do not want to put up with this "wahala" anymore. I'm however not quite ready to cough up for a 17" Mac Book Pro, besides one more laptop in my house...erm, no. Besides I'm hoping that I can find an OS that would make me as smug as my SMU (smug mac users) friends. Thankfully Linux has become a more appealing OS with the release of distros like Ubuntu. My choice, LinuxMint is a very well put together OS based on Ubuntu but, a hell of a lot prettier. It really is very pretty. It can be run from a CDRom but, is better served running on the harddrive. I installed LinuxMint Daryna as a dual boot with Windows XP, no real headaches there. All seems relatively well so far. Yes one is seriously suffering from Newbieitis - installing the simplest thing is a 30 minute trawl through reams of googled pages but I hope that this OS can offer me 'Peace of mind', something that only came in short bursts from Windows. LinuxMint is blindingly fast, pretty to look at, has the force of the Linux Open Source community behind it and it costs zero. How cool is that!
Now all I have to do is to figure out how to install 'Moviestar', FlashDevelop,Flex SDK, FlexBuilder 3 and Flash Media Server amongst others, sigh :(

Having being indoctrinated into the wonderful world of the Arabian Nights as a child, I've always wished I could fly on a magic- carpet, own a magic-lamp and all the other wonderful things therein. It seems that via Papervision and abit of Bitmap Perlin Noise jiggery pockery I may be able to at least create my own. This is the first of many iterations of my Magic carpet. It is still very primitive