Ubuntu 9.04 was released on Thursday so I promptly grabbed the torrent file and downloaded it as quick as a 100Mbit connection would allow. I got a new external drive to back up the rest of my data and then wiped my lappy so that I could start from scratch. I previously had 8.10 32bit on there and decided to finally move over to 64bit. Everything is now all up and running pretty close to how I had it before and I still have similar gripes that I had with 8.10.

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.