art, life and software development

My VLC media player suddenly started to disappear every-time I tried to play videos - the audio play-back was fine. This procedure fixed it. Look at your video output settings in VLC. Tools/Preferences/Video/Output. Change the video device out settings. Video play resumed for me without any hassles. Good luck

The one thing alternative Flex Builder Linux and other Flex IDE alternatives (AXDT, FDT...) have been missing is a design view for flex component layouts. Well it seems the problem has been solved with the AIR application DesignView. DesignView is a "GUI tool for Flex applications layout composition", providing the basic functionality of the Flex Builder Design View. This is the work of Max and Mike McMullin and I for one really commend them for their work. I must confess that there is some way to go to bring it up to the level of functionality of the Flex/FlashBuilder design view but, it does the job and is a perfect design view option for FlexBuilder Linux, AXDT and FDT. AXDT has integrated it into their Eclipse plugin. This addition really elevates the posibilities of AXDT as a serious swf building alternative IDE to FlexBuilder. Please note that you may need to set up the Adobe player security settings within the Eclipse AXDT plugin folder or you will be sandboxed. The location path will be something like this "/home/ayo/gallileo/plugins/org.axdt.mxml_0.0.7.0/designview.index.html". The designview project is hosted at sourceforge. You can do your MXML layout using the online version tool that will generate the code you need from your layout. The AIR option is preferable in my view because you can load your existing MXML files into it.

It's getting a bit irritating to find that when a goodish bit of industry standard software is released, Linux builds always gets released last or not at all. As an Actionscript developer it was nice to know for a while that Adobe had my back and was actually putting some effort into the development of FlexBuilder for Linux. I've used the IDE for over a year and inspite of its obvious shortfalls compared to the Windows version its been great. Now that's coming to an end since it seems that Adobe feels its no longer worth the time and effort to continue that development program. So once again its time to jump into the wild and see what is out there re, Linux - Actionscript / Flex development.
I've been trialing quite a few and in all honesty none come close to FlexBuilder for Linux (of the ones I have tried). However there are a few promising options out there and my hope is that as more attention comes to bear on these tools theire development teams get all the support they need (financial and otherwise) to make these tools true contenders.
My recommendations for the moment are:

1. IntelliJIDEA: Of all the IDEs out there this seems to be the most complete and competitive. Actually it does seem to have quite a few features  that are an improvement on the FlexBuilder/Eclipse format. It has all the debugging features. It also provides and import from Eclipse feature - though I must comfess I was not very successfull using that feature and got a whole gang of errors - from a project that compiled prefectkly in Eclipse. Installiation is a bit ropey in Ubuntu - and I've found myself constantly having to reset the IDEA_JDK=$JDK_HOME in order to activate the IDE. On occasion I've also found the typing to be a tad slow. However when its settled its a very good IDE. I'm not sure if its because I'm not conversant with it but, its customisation features seem to be quite limited. I'm sure this will improve when the user base expands.

2. AXDT: This is a plug into Eclipse and I found it quite comfortable after installation. Installation though was an absolute pain in the neck. The documentaion is scant and if you try to install unto any version of Eclipse before 3.5 you will really find yourself up against it. I lost 2 Eclipse setups on account of my initial efforts. However on Eclipse Gallileo it installed like a breeze. It is worthwhile to read the installation instructions. Once installed its quite nice and can be somewhat FlexBuilderesque - no doubt because of my familiarity with the Eclipse interface. However it is obviously a work in progress and the first thing you will notice is the lack of a debug feature. In addition it seems impossible to get AXDT to allow you view the compile project in the external browser no matter how many times you set it to do so - though that may be my fault. There's stil a lot of work to be done here but when completed it will be a joy to work with. Its customisation features are none-existent and as I said before, there is virtually no documentation.

3: FDT: Probably better than AXDT - In fact I'm sure it is but its very expensive and so I did not try it

4: Spket: A work in progress no doubt but, may actually turn out to be the best of the lot. Its wierd my saying so because it does not compile Actionscript or MXML at the moment - which I guess should be the core functionality of any Flash building IDE. Its built on Eclipse os its interface is very familiar and it has a lovey drag and drop feature for moving compinents from the library unto the MXML editor - not visual - still it is very nice. However until it can actually run and debug Actionscript it remains just a nice concept

This was culled from the Adobe labs site. Purely selfish reasons as a personal reminder for moi.

Follow these simple steps to upgrade the SDK used by Flex Builder Linux on your machine:

    * Download the Adobe AIR SDK from www.adobe.com/go/airlinux.
    * Go to the sdks/3.0.0/ folder (in the Flex Builder installation directory).
    * Delete the "runtimes" folder.
    * Extract the latest Adobe AIR SDK and copy its contents into sdks/3.0.0/, overwriting existing files.
    * Go to sdks/3.0.0/bin/ and rename adl and adt as adl_lin and adt_lin (if adl_lin and adt_lin already exist there, remove them).
    * Go to sdks/3.0.0/runtimes/air/ and create a symlink "Linux" pointing to the "linux" folder in the same directory.


N.B A symlink: In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a special type of file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname resolution. (Wikipedia)

For some strange reason, Acrobat 9 + seems to crash seconds after opening a PDF document in Ubuntu Jaunty. Doubtless other Linux users may experience this in their different distros. It happens both as a standalone PDF and in the Firefox plug in. There does not seem to be a workaround or fix for the moment. My solution was to uninstall Acrobat reader 9 and install Acrobat Reader 8. That works fine. I'll put AR9 back on when Adobe sorts out the problem

Brasero's normalisation plugin is buggy. If you have more than one audio track in a burn list it loops endlessly at the beginning of the burn process, preventing the burn process from completing. The workaround is to go to Edit>Plugins and disable the Normalisation plugin. The downside of this of course is No-Normalisation of your audio tracks. Other than this I do like Brasero - the Audio split tool is really useful.

To use the FLVStreamer tool to extract an RTMP stream you need to know the rtmp address of the target stream. Once you have that change directory to the install directory of the FLVStreamer and write the following commands:

$ ./flvstreamer-1.7_ubuntu_jackalope -r 'rtmp://[IP address or host name]: [port]/river/alpha/sample1.f4v' -o testdump.f4v

It was delightful to see that the utility could also retrieve *.f4v files. I guess this means that any H264 encoded file is extractable
. The same commands work for the rtmpdump tool.