But when I was downloading the Fedora ISO this morning I remembered a little project that I had religiously followed for a while and even compiled a highly unstable x server to try it out and that was Peter Hutterer’s MPX. This project was designed to allow multiple mouse pointers natively in the x server. I had forgotten about trying this out when I upgraded my system to Ubuntu 10.04 but this morning I went digging around for the info on how to do it and this is what I came up with after piecing things together.

To find out what crap you’ve got plugged into your computer that can be used type:

$ xinput list

and that should return something like:

Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
Virtual core XTEST pointer                  id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
Logitech USB Receiver                       id=9    [slave  pointer  (2)]
Logitech USB Receiver                       id=10   [slave  pointer  (2)]
Logitech USB Receiver                       id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]
SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                  id=15   [slave  pointer  (2)]
Virtual core keyboard                       id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
Virtual core XTEST keyboard                 id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
Video Bus                                   id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
Power Button                                id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
Sleep Button                                id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
zc3xx                                       id=11   [slave  keyboard (3)]
Logitech USB Receiver                       id=12   [slave  keyboard (3)]
AT Translated Set 2 keyboard                id=14   [slave  keyboard (3)]

Ok, so for this howto I want to move my laptops built-in keyboard (id 14) and touchpad (id 15) to their own group. First I have to create the new group like so:

$ xinput create-master laptop
$ xinput list

The second list you bring back will have the new groups there:

...
laptop pointer                          id=16    [master pointer  (17)]
laptop XTEST pointer                    id=18    [slave  pointer  (16)]
laptop keyboard                         id=17    [master keyboard (16)]
laptop XTEST keyboard                   id=19    [slave  keyboard (17)]

Then it is a simple matter of reattaching the mouse (id 15) and keyboard (id 14) to the new groups (ids 16 and 17 respectively):

$ xinput reattach 15 16
$ xinput reattach 14 17

Then simply start using them. There are still things that need to be enabled on a program level for this to be a truly user friendly experience and I myself do not have a practical use for multiple input devices like this yet. I can see how if you could constrain the range of motion of the devices to a single monitor and hook up multiple monitors, keyboards and mice you would have a cost effective classroom set up for students or even use this on a large touch surface for design, video editing and so on.

CIW currently offers a range of certifications but there were 2 there that caught my eye and are things I will go for in the future (after my PR is finally sorted) and those were the Enterprise Developer and the Security Analyst. I looked over the requisites for the Enterprise Developer certification and it’s fairly straight forward, there is not really anything I need to learn extra to do the course and gain the certification since I do that anyway.

The Security Analyst has a prerequisite that you complete a 3rd party certification before going for their exam. When I looked at the 3rd party list there were the usual suspects MSCA, MCSE, CCNP etc. But there was one that I had not heard of before and that is the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH). Having a strong interest and past hands on experience in this activity lead me to finding out everything I could about this course and the marketability of it in my career. I found myself thinking “hello……I can be incarcerated certified for this?!”.

It actually looks quite promising. The course is designed more to teach a person how to hack/crack by various methods and how to keep yourself up to date on the latest exploits and vulnerabilities. While at first glance training people to do these nefarious acts may seem irresponsible to the average person (even your employer). You have to realise that there are people out there finding end exploiting these vulnerabilities, creating tools and causing mischief without being trained. So what defence do you have against them? Hire one or hire a team of them! Get them to run attacks on your site, network and even staff members (read: not physical attacks on staff members even though they may deserve it, but things like social engineering, shoulder surfing and the like) and show you where you need to improve.

After reviewing all the info and previewing some course material I find that I am quite interested in getting CEH certification and will probably go for it later this year when the time and money are available.

As a further note I would also encourage people who are working in the IT industry to learn how to do their jobs correctly. I see so many people today passing themselves off as web developers, programmers and system administrators without knowing how the technologies they are using work, not knowing how to keep them secure and not doing a very good job at completing even the basic tasks involved in these positions. I think I will rant about this later and provide some more in depth information in that post.

So, if you’re keen on trying it out then go ahead, you will probably still be best to follow the step I outlined in a previous post as well as use a patch created by James.

On the other hand you could try out feiy’s port of Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 to Linux, which I have had some good success with.

Another product people seem fairly pleased with is FDT and according to their site version 3.5 will include better MXML support. As a free plug for them, they support the Red5 project which is now at v0.9.0 RC2 and is a great, free, replacement for Flash Media Server.

All in all you should hope, pray, petition and/or sign FB-19053 (choose whatever suits, but Adobe probably only reads the bug reports…) so that they can give us a working version of Flex/Flash Builder for Linux.

Quite simply he claims to have Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 working natively under Eclipse in Linux. He backs up this claim with screenshots and a downloadable eclipse archive of his work.

I will report back later today if this has worked for me or not but if you are interested in this sort of thing then you should check out his blog here

UPDATE:

So I’ve tested it, compiled with it and even threw an existing, fairly large, project at it. It works great. There is no design mode for those wondering, but I choose to view this port with a certain amount of reserved optimism that if one person can do this quite easily, then Adobe shouldn’t have much harder of a time…..or they should hire feiy.

There were a few things that I initially came up against that bugged me, but were very minor. First being that the archive wouldn’t decompress for me until I stripped the .gz off the end (could be my quirky system).

Second, which was probably due to trying this in a VM of Ubuntu 9.10 that I haven’t set up properly, I couldn’t just add the directory to the sources list in Eclipse. So I ended up just dropping the files over the top of eclipse.

I was successfully able to compile both Flex SDK 3.4 and 4.0 projects and I did it all in Eclipse 3.5, Galileo.

As per usual, if you haven’t already, go and vote on FB-19053 to show Adobe how much we want this to happen. And if you’ve been too lazy to sign up so you can’t vote then maybe now’s the time you finally pull your finger out and get involved.

I’ve just built 2.6.31 and it’s a very nice kernel. KMS works fairly well so far and it will be nice to try it out in Ubuntu 9.10 when it arrives (and then add in the xserver 1.7 ppa when it’s available).

My laptop is nothing spectacular, and this kernel doesn’t provide support for every option or add on device for this laptop. It was built for my specs to make my personal experience nicer, but I’m putting it up here so it could give you a starting point if you have some similar specs to me.

It has:

• Core 2 Duo
• ATI Mobility x1400
• and an Atheros 5xxx Wireless Card (custom, just like the nice big antennas on the back for superior uhh range with wireless stuff….)
• I also have an expresscard eSATA thing hooked up, USB drives, WM6.1 Phone (until android gets some GPS software I like)

So the kernel should work for those things plus some other more generic stuff.

Like I said if you wanna use it as a starting point for your own kernel, then good, that’s what it’s here for. If you don’t know how to do something right or don’t know if you need something extra in your kernel then either stick with a stock kernel or take a leap and read up about what type of hardware you have and what each option in the kernel is and how it affects you.

Config file for kernel 2.6.31 for Dell Insipron 6400

Introduction

I downloaded Eclipse 3.5 RC2, codename Galileo, yesterday to try it out because I was having some problems with the updater in Ganymede not wanting to update subversive because it required datatools 1.6.0 and I had 1.6.2. I solved that problem by uninstalling datatools and subversive completely then tried to reinstall the latest subversive and success, it worked!

But I also thought, hey I know Flex Builder for Linux doesn’t work in 3.4 or in 64 bit Eclipse but I will try solve the problem and get 3.5 and FBL working. So, here is my solution to get Flex builder for Linux installed in a 32 bit version of Galileo. I did all of this in Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64 so I do not know if you will come across any major problems in any other Linux distribution, previously I had written a guide on how to get FBL working with 32 bit Europa in Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64.

First things first – Preparation

We need all the part for this install and it’s much nicer to have them all on hand when you need them so here’s what’s required.

1. Download Eclipse 3.5 32 bit (I like the Classic flavour) from here.
   
2. Download Flex Builder for Linux from here.
3. Download the latest Flex SDK from here. (I currently use the free Flex SDK 3.3)
4. Download the latest AIR SDK from here.
5. Download the required patch components from here.
6. For 64 bit: Install ia32-sun-java6-bin and all its dependencies.
7. For 64 bit: Download my simple eclipse loader script from here.

Stage 2 – Installation

Let’s get this thing installed.

1. For 64 bit: In a terminal window run “sudo update-alternatives –config java” and select ia32-java-6-sun as your jre of choice.
2. Unpack your Eclipse download and place it where you want it to be, I like /usr/local/bin/eclipse-galileo, by running “tar zxf eclipse-SDK-3.5RC2-linux-gtk.tar.gz” to unpack it.
3. Chmod Flex Builder for Linux install so it can be executed by running “chmod a+x flexbuilder_linux_install_a4_081408.bin“.
4. Install Flex Builder for Linux making sure to point it at the right location for Galileo. “./flexbuilder_linux_install_a4_081408.bin“. NB. Do not install over a previous Eclipse installation or Flex Builder installation.
5. Unpack the patch “tar zxf eclipse-galileo-fbl-patch.tar.gz“.
6. Go in to ~/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/eclipse/plugins and delete the directory “com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.204732″ and “com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.204732.jar”.
7. Copy the eclipse directory in the patch folder to where you installed Flex Builder.
8. For 64 bit: Move the eclipse.sh script into your eclipse install folder and run “chmod a+x eclipse.sh“.
9. For 64 bit: Set java back to the regular 64 bit variety using the same method as step 1 (but obviously selecting just java-6-sun).
10. For 64 bit: Please check out this link to get information on how to install 32 bit FireFox in a chroot environment for debugging. You then have to set up the link to /usr/lcoal/bin/firefox32 in your eclipse preferences as your web browser.

You should now be able to start eclipse and enjoy the Flex goodness (you may have to run “eclipse -clean” if you jumped the gun and have run it before following these steps). But please note, as with any eclipse upgrade, that you should use a new workspace folder and import your projects into it.

Stage 3 – Updating the Flex SDK

I did not try build a project with the included 3.0.0 SDK with flex builder because I want the latest. Latest stable anyway. So here is how you can update the SDK.

1. Move the Flex SDK into a directory, like “3.3.0″, and unpack it “unzip flex_sdk_3.3.0.4852.zip“.
2. Move the AIR SDK into a temporary directory, like “airsdk”, and unpack it also “tar xjf AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2“
3. Go in to the AIR SDK folder then into the bin directory and rename “adl” and “adt” to “adl_lin” and “adt_lin”.
4. Copy all the contents of the AIR SDK on top of the Flex SDK, overwriting and existing files
5. Move the Flex SDK folder into ~/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/sdks/
6. Start Eclipse, then go Window -> Preferences -> Flex -> Installed Flex SDKs and either add 3.3.0 to this list or replace 3.0.0 with 3.3.0 and make it your default.

You should now be able to build Flex/AIR projects.

Final Word

Thanks for sticking with me thus far and hopefully you should have Eclipse Galileo all set up now and running Flex Builder for Linux. I did not come up with all of these solutions on my own, but I did cobble together and add my own flair to what worked for me from these sources:

HOWTO: 32-Bit Chroot on 64-Bit Installs
Flex Builder 3 plugin don’t work with Eclipse 3.4

UPDATE 30/09/2009:
RIA Cowboy James Ward has issued a patch that solves FB-21284 (for him, me and at least one other person). If you find yourself with this problem then please check out his blog post here for the solution. As always, feedback is appreciated. Good work James.

But recently Linux and Mac ports of this browser have been found in the development channel of the chromium project. Check it out here but keep in mind that these are beta versions of the google chrome browser for these platforms at this time and they are feature incomplete (no flash plugin, no printing and a few other things) but it is a step in the right direction for fan-boys of all things google. Please note, too, that you need an Intel Mac with Mac OS 10.5.6 or later and the Linux flavour only comes in deb packages at this time.

What are my thoughts?

Well, I am not a fan of google chrome and while I will be using it for testing on all platforms it will not replace firefox as my daily browser of choice. It may sound a little cynical but I take serious points away from any program that doesn’t accept the default theme of my OS. (Adobe CS4, MS Office 2007 and Amarok 2 I’m looking at you…and hating it!) I choose my themes to look as pleasant as possible to my eyes and having a program that just decides it will break away from a standard just annoys me. The google chrome theme would probably look good in fedora…but there is no fedora package for it! (I know I can build from source. I’m just being annoyed, leave me alone.)

I know google chrome is lightweight and fast browser but it was Oscar Wilde that said that a cynic is “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” and I am one of those men at times. So if you like it, try it, tell me I’m wrong, but don’t come to me if something goes wrong with it.

What is it?
In the words of the PureMVC developers “PureMVC is a lightweight framework for creating applications based upon the classic Model, View and Controller concept”.

So what we want to take away from this is that Cliff Hall has created a very flexible and does a great job of keeping each object in your application truly encapsulated. I usually created my own MVC classes when coding my projects but this saves me that first bit of planning and coding and ensures that I create well organised code all the time.

What do I think?
I do have to say that at first glance I was a bit taken back by how much Cliff has broken everything up and required the coder to create proxies, mediators and commands and then register them with the façade then send and listen for notifications to perform actions (opposed to coding things directly into each component of the MVC pattern).

But, since I was either going to adopt this or Cairngorm for the latest project I am working on I persisted in learning what each framework had to offer and what each one require from me as the coder.

PureMVC has very good tutorials and documentation which made learning it quite easy and now that I have had a little experience coding with this framework I truly see the value in keeping everything so loosely coupled.

Another point for a coder fluent in multiple languages is that you are able to get this framework in a number of flavours including:

• AS2/AS3
• C#
• ColdFusion
• haXe
• Java
• JavaScript
• PHP
• and Python

So take a look at it, give the examples a test run and dive right into the well written and thought out guidelines.

So for me, running on a Dell Inspiron 6400, the upgrade has a few positives. I formatted the drives as ext4 and did my fresh install then proceeded to load up all the progs I had before. 9.04 uses the 2.6.28 kernel and that has included working support for the atheros wifi card I have, although I an going to keep a patched copy of madwifi on hand for good measure. The boot times are noticeably faster in 9.04 and even program load times are improved so I’m satisfied with my choice.

But now for the negatives. I’m a programmer so I constantly use Eclipse as my IDE of choice. I also love the latest version, Ganymede. Adobe, for the time being at least, has not got a stable build of the Flex Builder plug-in for Eclipse 3.4 and definately not for Eclipse 3.4 64bit.

So as with the 32bit Ubuntu I had to have 2 versions of Eclipse running if I wanted to use the MXML editor. I’ve installed the 64bit version of Ganymede and all the standard plugins I use. Then I went to install the 32 bit version of Europa and here are a few things you have to do if you wish to do the same thing I have done:

1. Install the 32bit JRE (“sudo apt-get install ia32-sun-java6-bin” and install its deps too)
2. Download Eclipse Europa from here and unpack it. (“tar zxvf eclipse-SDK-3.3.2-linux-gtk.tar.gz”)
3. I put my copy in /usr/local/bin/eclipse-europa then chowned it (“sudo chown -R username:usergroup /usr/local/bin/eclipse-europa”)
4. Then I made a launcher for Eclipse so that it would use the 32bit JRE and you can get that here
5. Before installing flex builder you should run Eclipse so that it does its initial setup. (I also use a separate workspace directory for my Flex/AIR jobs so I can have both versions of Eclipse running without conflict)
6. Download the Flex Builder plugin from here and while it is downloading make the 32bit JRE your default. (“sudo update-alternatives –config java” and select the ia32-java-6-sun flavour)
7. Then you can run the Flex Builder install. (“chmod a+x flexbuilder_linux_install_a4_081408.bin” and then “./flexbuilder_linux_install_a4_081408.bin”)
8. After it’s is installed correctly you can switch the default JRE back to your normal one so that Ganymede can run. (“sudo update-alternatives –config java” and select the regular java-6-sun flavour)
9. You can then run eclipse.sh and it should start Europa and you should be able to use Flex Builder.

This made it work for me but if you have any other troubles then let me know and I can try help out.

Update 2009-05-10: Vote for flex builder in linux to see the need for these sort of hacks to dissolve.

Update 2009-06-06: Flex Builder for Linux development may be on hold, but I’ve just got it working with Galileo RC2. Check it out here.