Setting up Flash Builder in Ubuntu 10.10

Adobe Flash Builder 4
Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

In a very sad news, Adobe has officially terminated the Linux Flex Builder project, which has stagnated in alpha status for more than three years now, olny receiving updates to extend the termination date. Regardless of the stated alpha status, the Linux Flex Builder plugin was very usable and quite stable, provided, of course, that you used it with Eclipse 3.3.

Since the current alpha 5 of the Linux Flex Builder plugin terminates at the end of this year and as Adobe has no intentions to allow anyone to use it past that termination date, I had to find an alternative.

Although JetBrains is welcoming all Flex programmers in Linux to switch to IntelliJ IDEA, I didn't want to learn yet an another IDE, especially one that is not open source nor free.

And finally I found the fb4linux project which works great (including the debugging).

The following is mostly a copy of the project wiki with only some additions to make it work with the Eclipse installed from Ubuntu repository.

1. Install Eclipse 3.5.x from Ubuntu repository;
   
2. Download the four FB4Linux* files from the fb4linux project download section, concatenate them to form FB4Linux.tar.bz2 and extract it somewhere.
   
3. Run Eclipse as root!
   sudo su; cd; eclipse
   
4. Select Window / Preferences and open the General / Capabilities section in the Preferences window.
   
5. Verify that Classic Update option is checked and close the preferences window.
   
6. Select Help / Software Updates / Manage Configuration
   
7. Right-click, select Add / Extension location... and browse to the Adobe Flash Builder 4 directory you extracted above.
   
8. Restart Eclipse as per its demands.
   

That's it, you can now open Eclipse from your user account and start coding Flex and AIR applications!