Flex 4 on Eclipse Galileo for Linux

Flash development on Linux is done with Flex SDK. Some nice people started at FB4LINUX have provided a GUI to develop Flash on Linux and this can be integrated into Eclipse IDE.

This article is an update to my other article. Additionally, Adobe placed a notice that they will no longer continue with the Flex Builder development. This means that you can only use command lines to work on future version of Flex. I guess this will affect FB4LINUX.

Following is a reference to install Flex SDK 4.0 on Eclipse Galileo 3.5.2.

Pre-installation checks: Have you installed Eclipse 3.5+ and Java Development Kit 1.6+


Step 1. Download the fb4linux files
Download in 4 parts from http://code.google.com/p/fb4linux/downloads/list
FB4Linuxaa
FB4Linuxab
FB4Linuxac
FB4Linuxad

Merge them together into a BZIP2 format and extract using the command prompt at the terminal. At the folder where you downloaded the 4 files, just type

cat FB4Linux* >FB4Linux.tar.bz2 bunzip2 FB4Linux.tar.bz2 tar -xvf FB4Linux.tar
I renamed the folder “Adobe Flash Builder 4” to “AFB4” since I did not want spaces between the folder name.

Copy contents of AFB4/eclipse/plugins to ~/.eclipse/[eclipse user folder]/plugins/

Step 2. Install Flex SDK

Download Flex 4.0/4.1 from http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4

Extract a copy of the Flex SDK from Adobe into a folder, example ~/.eclipse/flex4.0


Step 3. Configure Eclipse with the Flash Builder Application

Start Eclipse, from menu choose
Help → Software update → Find and install

Search for new features to install
Choose the folder AFB4/eclipse



Click Finish.

A new window will open,
Select the features to install → Others






Accept the license agreements.
5 new applications for Flash Builder / Flex will be installed.



Restart Eclipse

Step 4. Apply the SDK to a project

In Eclipse, create a new Flex project
File → New → Other...
Choose Flash Builder ->Flex Project → Click 'Next'
Enter a project name, example “HelloFlex” and click on “Configure Flex SDKs”
Click “Add”




Browse to the Flex SDK directory, e.g. ~/.eclipse/flex4.0 (See step 2)
Check on Flex 4.0 (or Flex 4.1), choose Apply then OK.
Choose Next, Next then confirm the library path (no changes required, normally).






Accept to switch to Flex perspective.


Step 5. Test with HelloFlex

Double click HelloFlex.mxml
Enter following code before the last line



<mx:panel title="Welcome" color="blue" paddingleft="30" paddingright="30" paddingtop="20" paddingbottom="20">

<mx:label text="Hello World">
<mx:button id="b1" label="Click Me">
</mx:button>

Right click HelloFlex.mxml and choose Run as ->Run Swf






These are notes just for references.

Using LVM

It was fun trying out LVM. Following are basics that needs to be remembered;

1. Partition the disk as type 8e (fdisk).

2. Create physical volume (PV). Use pvcreate

3. Create one volume group (GV) using all the PV. Use gvcreate

4. Create logical volumes (LV) on the GV. Use lvcreate

5. Format each LV with respective filesystem. E.g. Ext3fs, reiserfs using mkfs

6. Mount each LV. Use mount.

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.

Installed Ubuntu 10.04 on HP ProBook 4420s

Screen shots after installation on the laptop.

Restore Gnome desktop to default

IF you are like me trying all the different gnome tools and utilities, the desktop could get messed up and system screen freezes.

Solution:
Get a terminal (or press Ctrl+Alt+F1) and delete the Gnome desktop configuration file for that user. Command is as follows;

rm -rf .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity

AAC encoding not included in 10.04 ffmpeg

As a reminder, the Lucid or Ubuntu 10.04 does not have AAC decoding support. This means I cant convert FLV (Youtube) movies into a format that the Android can use.

Solution, is to use the Mediabuntu packages as informed by Ubuntu Forums.

In a nut shell, remove existing ffmpeg and use the Mediabuntu repo to download a fixed version of FFMPEG. Some of the other version of Ubuntu is fine, and no need to follow this step.

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get -q update

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-52

Shifting of OSCC

Staff operation area.

24 seater training room.

Front reception area.

Server hosting room for OSS mirror site and OSCC applications available to anyone. It is demo and showcase area.

Training material boxes arrive at MAMPU Cyberjaya.

The OSCC (oscc.org.my) has officially shifted address to MAMPU in Cyberjaya, Malaysia.

Xperia X10 updates to Android 2.1

Finally an announcement for upgrade of the X10.

See Sony Ericsson Blog

MyGOSSCON 2010

The major open source conference in Malaysia is on 2-3 Nov 2010. Registration as participant and exhibitor is on going...see you there!

Setting up Flex on Eclipse for Linux

Flash development on Linux is done with Flex SDK. Some nice people started at FB4LINUX have provided a GUI to develop Flash on Linux and this can be integrated into Eclipse IDE.

By the time I wrote this rticle, Adobe placed a notice that they will no longer continue with the Flex Builder development. This means that you can only use command lines to work on Flex. I guess this will affect FB4LINUX.

I refer to a number of sites before starting the installation and found one worth mentioning here. Matthew wrote with clarity and did cover what most other instructions provided and maybe a bit more.

Pre-installation checks: Have you installed Eclipse 3.5+ and Java Development Kit 1.5+

Step 1. Download the fb4linux files in 4 parts from http://code.google.com/p/fb4linux/downloads/list

• FB4Linuxaa
• FB4Linuxab
• FB4Linuxac
• FB4Linuxad

Merge them together into a BZIP2 format and extract using the command prompt at the terminal. At the folder where you downloaded the 4 files, just type

cat FB4Linux* >FB4Linux.tar.bz2
bunzip2 FB4Linux.tar.bz2
tar -xvf FB4Linux.tar

I renamed the folder to Adobe_Flash_Builder4 since I did not want spaces between the folder name.

Step 2. Download the eclipse plugin for FB4Linux from http://www.brighthub.com/hubfolio/matthew-casperson/media/p/78806.aspx

Unzip the file ecplise and copy the plugins to /usr/lib/eclipse/plugins

The plugins are;
com.adobe.coldfusion.rds.client_1.0.266425.jar
javax.wsdl_1.6.2.v200806030405.jar
org.apache.commons.lang_2.3.0.v200803061910.jar
org.apache.xerces_2.8.0.v200803070308.jar
org.apache.xml.resolver_1.1.0.v200806030311.jar

Step 3. Start Eclipse and apply the plugins.

In Eclipse select Window->Preferences->General->Capabilities and make sure that the Classic Update option is checked.
Click Help->Software Updates->New Feature to Install.
Click the New Local Site button, and type in the location where you extracted FB4Linux in step 1 (you will need to specify the eclipse subdirectory to be specific).
With the Adobe Flash Builder 4 site selected, click the Finish button. You will be asked which features to install. Tick the Adobe Flash Builder 4 feature and click Next.
Accept the terms and click the Next button and click Finish button.

Restart Eclipse.

Step 4: Install the Flex SDK from http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4
Download and extract a copy of the Flex SDK from Adobe into a folder flex4.1.0

Set Eclipse to use the Flex SDK by right clicking on your Flash project and selecting Properties. Select the ActionScript Compiler option.
Click the Add button to add the location of the Flex SDK you have extracted.
Click on the Run toolbar menu item and select the External Tools Configuration option.

Right click on the Program option and select the New option. Then fill out the Location and Arguments settings to point to your Flash standalone player and SWF file respectively.

Done...next to look for more flash tutorials.

Installing Libre Office 3.3

Wow,

Open source licensing is now showing how main stream OSS products can be shifted if those in control is not respected. The OpenOffice.org (I hope this name wont be part of power tussle) is now looking at a branch off called Libre Office. Though its in Beta but I expect lots of the bugs I am facing with the present OpenOffice.org provided by the long term support version of Ubuntu 10.04 to be fixed.

Most notable is the page numbering of the slide handout in Impress. Impress is still showing page 1 in the footer for all pages in OpenOffice.org 3.2.1.

Currently all testing packages of the first Libre Offfice can be found at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/testing/

From what I have read, looks like this will override the OOo in Windows but should co-exist with OOo in Linux. I will update this page with progress I make in installing the Libre Office(beta) 3.3. The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (size of upto 92Mb) needs to be installed before installing the Libre Office. This can be done with synaptic or at the command prompt type

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre sun-java6-fonts icedtea6-plugin

Step 1: open a terminal prompt. Download the Libre Office (LO) which is about 150Mb with either of these commands;

wget http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/testing/LO_3.3.0-beta1_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
OR
wget http://ftp.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/pub/tdf/libreoffice/testing/LO_3.3.0-beta1_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz

Step 2: Extract the tar.gz

Step 3: Switch to the folder en-US then install the DEB packages
cd en-US
sudo dpkg -i DEBS/*.deb
sudo dpkg -i DEBS/desktop-integration/*.deb



Internet crawling so slow. Will Unifi change things?

[Kubuntu] Updating OpenOffice.org 3.2.1

I have installed OOo 3.2.0 but there are a number of issues that seems to persist on Kubuntu 10.04 (LTS). For example;

1. When I create a macro to delete selected cells, it does not work. (Solved on 3.2.1)
2. Impress printout of handouts, I do not get the page foot numbers. All pages display as number 1.

[Upgraded OOo has not fixed the bugs I am facing]
Backup all of the extensions you have for OpenOffice.org 3.2.0, if you intend to use it in the future. Now, the steps to upgrade to OOo 3.2.1

Method 1:

1. Download OOo 3.2.1 from
   ftp://mirror.upm.edu.my/openoffice/stable/3.2.1/OOo_3.2.1_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
2. Open a terminal line and extract the tar.gz file
   tar -xzvf OOo_3.2.1_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
   
3. Remove existing OOo 3.2.0
   sudo apt-get remove openoffice*.*
4. Enter the extracted directory and install the .deb files
   cd OOO320_m18_native_packed-1_en-US.9502/DEBS
   sudo dpkg -i *.deb
   sudo dpkg -i desktop-integration/

Method 2:

1. In the software sources, enable the "software Sources"
2. Update packages and install OpenOffice.org-3.2.1
   

Reset user desktop for CentOS

On CentOS, after installing the Oracle OpenOffice.org (OOo), everything works fine. Since by default the PCs have auto update enabled, the users tend to update and this causes the CentOS version of OOo to corrupt the installed OOo.

One way to avoid this is to disable the auto update. Since it is a lab environment, I can easily delete and replace user1 account to remove previous configurations in OOo for user1.

Step 1. Create the 2 simple scripts to disable the auto update and reset the desktop for user1.

goreset.sh
#/bin/bash
echo "Resetting pc:"
chkconfig yum-updatesd off
tmpwatch 0 /tmp
echo "Creating user user1"
userdel -r user1
useradd -m user1
passwd oscc
echo "User created, going to reboot"
reboot

startscript.sh
#!/bin/bash
LOGFILE="./coombreset.log"
echo "Enter server name:"
read SERVER
if [ -e $SERVER ]
then
exit
fi
scp prepare-cooomb-test.sh root@"$SERVER":~
ssh root@"$SERVER" ./goreset.sh
echo $SERVER >> $LOGFILE

Step 2. execute (run) the script named startscript.sh

-end-

Install Windows on Linux

To get MS Windows programs installed on Linux (Ubuntu this case), install Wine and other related files.

Step 1: Open a terminal. Or through the Kpackagekit, install packages below.

Step 2: Install packages by the command below;
sudo apt-get install libmpg123-0 libwbclient0 samba-common smbclient ttf-symbol-replacement winbind wine wine1.2 wine1.2-gecko pptview

MS PPTX and DOCX files can be viewed with OpenOffice.org 3, or the viewers from MS Office (I am yet to try these 2).

1. PowerPoint
2. Word

Disable Nautilus on KDE automount

After installing KDE on Ubuntu 10.04, there were some challenges. One of it is that the USB disk when plugged in, opens (mount) automatically and launches the Gnomes Nautilus. This is not a real problem but when you are used to KDE's environment, the preferred File browser is either Konqueror or Dolphin. In this case, I choose Dolphin.

The most likely cause is that Gnome's GVFS is running and opens the disk automatically. Doing a "ps aux" you will find the following processes running;

/usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-trash --spawner :1.39 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/0 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gdu-volume-monitor /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-burn --spawner :1.39 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/1 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-afc-volume-monitor /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-metadata /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd



What is GVFS?
GVFS replaces Gnome's virtual file system (VFS). Programmes built with the library GIO or Gnome I/O will be invoke automatically and managed by the gvfsd service.

The gvfs-fuse module is used only when the application is not built with the GIO library. With GVFS, Nautilus takes over the automount/autorun responsibilities from gnome-volume-manager. A good read on GVFS is in this 2006 article.



Stopping processes
If I stop (kill) the gvfsd and gvfs-gdu-volume-monitor, Nautilus does not get open anymore. But instead of killing this process, I will approach this by assuming that gvfs reads from Gnome Desktop Manager configuration files.

Step 1:
Open a terminal (e.g. konsole) and type
gconf-editor

Step 2:
In the left window of Gconf-editor, choose /apps/nautilus/preferences and remove check mark for
1) media_automount
2) media_automount_open

Step 3:
Close the Gconf-editor and log out. After you log back in, no more Nautilus.

Installing ubuntu 10.04 and KDE

KDE 4.4 looks good on the Ubuntu 10.04. Yup, finally have the time to upgrade but I only had the Ubuntu CDROM, so later after the install had to manually install KDE4.

Using reference from my previous blog on Installing Kubuntu 9.10. Launch from KMenu the Synaptics or Kpackagekit to install additional applications and libraries. Below is a checklist of items to install.

note: to install via the terminal (CLI), e.g.
sudo apt-get install wvdial

A. Adding KDE desktop manager to Ubuntu

1. kdebase-workspace
2. kde-window-manager
   

B. For the web experience to surf and email

1. openjdk-6-jre (using hotspot)
   
2. thunderbird & enigmail
   
3. icedtea6-plugin
4. adobe-flashplugin
   
5. See item D.
   

C. System tools

1. gdecrypt
   
2. password-gorilla
3. ssh sshfs ksshaskpass
   
4. khelpcenter4
5. wvdial
6. nmap
7. wireshark
8. ksnapshot
   

D. Multimedia, Fonts and codecs

1. ttf-mscorefonts-installer & cabextract
   
2. kubuntu-restricted-extras
3. vlc videolan-doc mozilla-plugin-vlc vlc-plugin-sdl (include libvcdinfo0)
4. k3b libk3b6-extracodecs
5. gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
6. gimp-help-en & gimp-data-extras
7. kdenlive
8. recorditnow
   

E. IBM Thinkpad utils

1. tpb
2. tp-smapi-dkms
   

F. OpenOffice.org extra stuff

1. openoffice.org-ogltrans
2. openoffice.org-report-builder
3. openoffice.org-presentation-minimizer
4. mozilla-openoffice.org
5. openoffice.org-mysql-connector & mysql-server
   
6. myspell-en-gb
7. openoffice.org-kde
8. libmysql-java
9. mdbtools
   

G. Software development, Eclipse and Android (refer to previous post)

G.1. Apache, PHP & mysql (see previous post)

1. apache2 & php5 & php-pear (after done check that modules are enabled, run command a2enmod php5 )
   
2. mysql-server
3. php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 libapache2-mod-auth-mysql

Not everything can be done via the synaptics. Others that require downloading from the internet manually;

1. truecrypt-6.3a & libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb
   
2. Extract PCL_ZTEDCV.tar.gz and install (ZTE usb modem) & libqt3-mt_3.3.8-b-0ubuntu3_i386.deb
3. Download AdobeReader (to view PDF files) from http://get.adobe.com/reader
   

Plasma widget error - "could not create a python scriptengine"

In Kubuntu 10.04, Adding widgets may give webkit and scriptengine errors. Here are some of the solutions.

"could not create a python scriptengine"
When installing Solar System widget to desktop, that error appears. Solution is to install plasma-scriptengine-python, e.g. at the terminal (CLI) type;

sudo apt-get install plasma-scriptengine-python

"could not create a webkit scriptengine for the scripted image widget"
When installing Scripted Image widget to desktop, above error appears. Solution, install plasma-scriptengine-webkit. E.g. at CLI type;

sudo apt-get install plasma-scriptengine-webkit

-the end-