Mobile phone programming with AXDT

Free and open sourced cross platform Flash development tools are available for Eclipse IDE. This is good news to have a change to explore what flash can do for the mobile devices. There are other tools out there for development but for now, this will be my starting point.

As a start to ActionScript3 development, the IDE and APIs need to be setup. Here are instructions for Ubuntu 10.04 with Eclipse 3.5 Galileo to use AXDT. Older version of AXDT used the Eclipse's IMP, but now it uses XText.

Step 1: Install Eclipse and the plug-in environment

sudo apt-get install eclipse eclipse-pde

Step 2: Install the ActionScript3 environment with AXDT

- Start Eclipse
Choose Help -> Install New Software…
Location is http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/tmf/updates/releases
(previously used http://download.eclipse.org/technology/imp/updates)
- Click Add and give it a name, IMP
- Click OK to return to Available Software window and select IMP and IMP Prerequisites
- Click Next and Finish to install
- Restart Eclipse once installation is done
Choose Help -> Install New Software…
Location is http://svn.codespot.com/a/eclipselabs.org/axdt/trunk/site
- Click Add and give it a name, AXDT
- Click OK to return to Available Software window and select Axdt builds
- Click Next, check in to accept the terms (agreement) and click Finish to install.

Step 3: Apply correction for embedded images. See http://axdt.org/ticket/97
Here, to remove the AXDT errors on "static-link-runtime-shared-libraries option to true" the configuration file needs to be edited.

- Find the AXDT flex-config.xml file, choose Windows->Preferences, choose AXDT->Flex 4 SDK
- Open the file .eclipse/org.eclipse.platform_3.5.0_155965261/plugins/org.axdt.flex4.sdk_4.0.0.14159_mpl/flexsdk/frameworks/
/flex-config.xml
- Edit the line
<
static-link-runtime-shared-libraries>false
</static-link-runtime-shared-libraries>

and change value false to true.
Restart the Eclipse.

Step 4: Deploy the IPhone apps
Install Adobe AIR from http://get.adobe.com/air

Step 5: Deploy Android 2.1 Apps
See My Android post

Step 6: Install a debugging environment
Install De MonsterDebugger

Using shared folder on virtualbox OSE

Virtual box has a feature to access the host folder from a guest machine. Following is Centos 5.5 Linux guest that is set to access the Ubuntu 10.04 Linux host machine.

Host machine (Ubuntu)
- shared folder: /home/username/Downloads
- virtualbox share name: shared

Guest machine (Centos)
- mount share as /mnt/hostfolder

Step 1: Install Virtualbox Guest Additions.
Read the manual.

Step 2: Apply the shared folder for Virtualbox
Open the virtualmachine (guest) and go to Devices ->Shared Folders
Click on "Add Shared Folders", its a plus sign. Enter the following values
Folder path: /home/username/Downloads
Folder name (no white spaces): shared

Step 3: Mount the shared folder
Reboot the guest machine and mount with following command (use root/administrator);

mount -t vboxsf shared /mnt/hostfolder

Then apply the required permissions to the folder.

Free magazine from HITB!

In issue 5 of the HITB magazine 2011, there are 2 articles of interest.

1. An experiment Linux kernel auditing

2. Measuring SSH attacks (with Honeypot)

See http://magazine.hackinthebox.org/issues/HITB-Ezine-Issue-005.pdf

Howto clone Ubuntu 10.04 display on a projector

The Ubuntu 10.04 on HP ProBook 4420s was able to connect to the projector by pressing the fn+f4 keys. This cycled through 4 modes but nothing that allowed me to view a clone of the display on laptop and projector.

Here are steps to resolve this (results in 800x600 for most projectors).

Step 1: Login to laptop and then plug-in projector.

Step 2: Identify the mode available for 800x600 and add to the existing display modes

xrandr -q
cvt 800 600

example of output:
nicholas@nicholas-laptop-kde:~/scripts$ xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1366 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS1 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 310mm x 174mm
1366x768 59.6*+
640x480 59.9

$ cvt 800 600
# 800x600 59.86 Hz (CVT 0.48M3) hsync: 37.35 kHz; pclk: 38.25 MHz
Modeline "800x600_60.00" 38.25 800 832 912 1024 600 603 607 624 -hsync +vsync

Step 3: Create following script called clone800x600.sh that add the 800x600 capability to the display and enables on both projector and laptop. Notice the bold fonts above is copied to the first xrandr command below.


#!/bin/bash
xrandr --newmode "800x600_60.00" 38.25 800 832 912 1024 600 603 607 624 -hsync +vsync
xrandr --addmode LVDS1 800x600_60.00
xrandr --output VGA1 --off
xrandr --output LVDS1 --off
xrandr --fb 800x600
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 800x600 --rate 60
xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 800x600_60.00 --same-as VGA1 --auto --scale 1x1 --panning 0x0

Step 4: Make executable and run the script

chmod u+x clone800x600.sh
./clone800x600.sh

To switch back to original settings, press fn+f4.

Next, try to get it working at higher resolution that the projector can support.