Best Buy offers Linux on laptops

While browsing the blog of a fellow penguin lover, I noticed his latest post. Apparently Best Buy is offering Linux on laptops now. Links and images are posted over on Vincent’s post.

Installing Adobe Flex Builder Linux Public Alpha on Fedora 8

I’m embarking on a little Flex development, but I ran into a snag installing the Flex Builder into my *very* stock Fedora 8 system. I found a link to some comments here in follow up comment to the author of the post.

Apparently (and I’m not an Eclipse expert), the problem stems from Fedora’s choice of “Eclipse Europa”, rather than “Eclipse Classic”.

Problems:

• The install says “Choose an existing Eclipse 3.3 or higher root folder to be extended with the Flex Builder Plug-ins”



• An error message is displayed when you select the correct folder

The installation proceeds fine from that point, but the Flex project isn’t available in Eclipse. As it turns out, you need to copy some files by hand:

cd ~/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/
cd com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site
sudo cp features/* /usr/share/eclipse/features/
sudo cp plugins/* /usr/share/eclipse/plugins/


And that’s all there is to it – you’ll have access to the Flex Projects in Eclipse. I’ll update this post if I find any problems with this method of patching the installation

Update: 13-Apr-2008

The above works great for *creating* a flex application, but it will not compile. There is an error generated that says:


Flex 0.0 (1): Flex SDK location "/home/.../configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/159/1/.cp/devsdks/moxie" does not exist.


I struggled and struggled to find the elusive “moxie” plugin. Alas, It was not found on my computer, or in any of the jar files. It turns out you need to download the “Adobe Flex SDK” from the “Stable Builds” section of (Adobe Wiki link):
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3

1. Download the file
2. unzip it into a directory
3. In Eclipse, Window->Preferences->Flex->Installed Flex SDKs->Add the directory you just created
4. Delete the other installed SDKs for moxie (Flex 0.0)
5. Enjoy!

I hope this helps someone
If you want to test to see if your installation works, add the following between the mx:Application tags in a Flex project


<mx:Canvas width="100%" height="100%">
<mx:Label text="Hello World"/>
</mx:Canvas>