Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) and Flex Builder for Linux…working!

NOTE: This post is a little long so bare with me.

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.

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

Stage 2 – Installation

Let’s get this thing installed.

For 64 bit: In a terminal window run “sudo update-alternatives –config java” and select ia32-java-6-sun as your jre of choice.
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.
Chmod Flex Builder for Linux install so it can be executed by running “chmod a+x flexbuilder_linux_install_a4_081408.bin“.
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.
Unpack the patch “tar zxf eclipse-galileo-fbl-patch.tar.gz“.
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”.
Copy the eclipse directory in the patch folder to where you installed Flex Builder.
For 64 bit: Move the eclipse.sh script into your eclipse install folder and run “chmod a+x eclipse.sh“.
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).
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.

Move the Flex SDK into a directory, like “3.3.0″, and unpack it “unzip flex_sdk_3.3.0.4852.zip“.
Move the AIR SDK into a temporary directory, like “airsdk”, and unpack it also “tar xjf AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2“
Go in to the AIR SDK folder then into the bin directory and rename “adl” and “adt” to “adl_lin” and “adt_lin”.
Copy all the contents of the AIR SDK on top of the Flex SDK, overwriting and existing files
Move the Flex SDK folder into ~/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/sdks/
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.

3.5, 9.04, air, eclipse, flex, galileo, linux, ubuntu

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 and is filed under Nerd Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

#1 by Julien at June 8th, 2009

Ok, it’s not working for me, I still have this “Assertion failed”…

I feel somewhat helpless here, I don’t know what to do to try to resolve this.

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#2 by Danyul at June 8th, 2009

The most mandatory steps that I had to do to get this working were deleting the existing “com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.204732? directory and “com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.204732.jar” file before pasting in the patched ones. Then running “eclipse -clean” to strat it up the first time.

If you are on 64 bit you may want to leave your java set to the 32 bit version while you try to get it going. That way you don’t have to run a script to start and can just run “eclipse -clean” natively.

#3 by Julien at June 8th, 2009

Nope, I’m on 32bit.

Note that your steps work beautifully for 3.4 ! (I used the patched version from your tekool.net)

I tried with 3.5 RC2, maybe you used another milestone ?
How do you patch these jars BTW ?
(teach how to fish.. )

#4 by Danyul at June 8th, 2009

Hmm I did it with the Classic 3.5 RC2. I’ll try the latest build when I get home and see if I have any probs with RC4.

I’m not sure how the jars were patched. I would like to know that myself. I used the tektool ones and renamed things simply to match the latest ones with alpha 4 of FBL.

#5 by Danyul at June 8th, 2009

Ok, I did have a problem getting RC4 to work but I’ve cobbled together new patched files to use.

Try them here: http://blog.danyul.id.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/eclipse-galileo-fbl-patchtar.gz (rename to .tar.gz)

The build of eclipse I used was from here: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.5RC4-200906051444/download.php?dropFile=eclipse-SDK-3.5RC4-linux-gtk.tar.gz

Let me know how you go with that. BTW patches are made, I would assume, by decompiling the class (against the license agreement) and fixing it then recompiling it.

#6 by brownman at June 10th, 2009

u r great !

we like smart people like u !!!

#7 by brownman at June 11th, 2009

on 32 bit,
must have all the time to choose “project–>clean”
to take off the last error comment

#8 by Danyul at June 11th, 2009

What is the error message you are getting?

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#9 by whosthejboss at June 13th, 2009

This works great! Does this work with Gumbo?

#10 by Danyul at June 13th, 2009

Yes, you can use the Flex 4 SDK with flex builder for linux (even in galileo) however you must make sure that you set the flash version to version 10 for your project to compile successfully.

The flex 4 SDK actually has a very professional theme and I’m looking forward to it going gold.

To use it, simply download the SDK from http://opensource.adobe.com and add it to the SDKs list in your preferences, then make it the active SDK for your project.

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#11 by Tom Chiverton at June 25th, 2009

(suse 10.3 64bit. 32bit JVM, Eclipse 3.5 release, Builder from labs)
Everything goes swimmingly until I do a compile, and then I get the ever unhelpful ‘An internal build error has occurred’ in the Problems tab. There doesn’t appear to be anything helpful output to the console, and the .log file just says
!ENTRY org.eclipse.core.resources 2 75 2009-06-25 14:08:30.671
!MESSAGE Errors occurred during the build.
!SUBENTRY 1 com.adobe.flexbuilder.project 2 75 2009-06-25 14:08:30.671
!MESSAGE Errors running builder ‘Flex’ on project ‘fraudScoreCard-admin-client’.
!STACK 0
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: “The attribute value type is com.adobe.flexbuilder.project.compiler.internal.ProblemManager and expected is one of java.lang.String, Boolean, Integer”
at org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.MarkerInfo.checkValidAttribute(MarkerInfo.java:84)
at org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.MarkerInfo.setAttributes(MarkerInfo.java:172)
at org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.Marker.setAttributes(Marker.java:304)
at com.adobe.flexbuilder.project.compiler.internal.ProblemManager.createMarker(Unknown Source)
….etc……

Is there a better way to let you know of errors than just this thread ? Happy to discus over email if I’m not clear.

#12 by Danyul at June 25th, 2009

Hi Tom,
I’ve come across one thing which I’m currently trying to solve with the release version of Galileo and FBL and the initial error message in the console is the same when I am trying to compile a module on its own.

Does the project compile correctly if you do a clean and build?

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- #13 by Tom Chiverton at June 25th, 2009
  
  Doing some binary-search code foo, it turned out to be an external CSS file and one other class (based on TitleWindow) that caused it. A new workspace had no effect. I split the CSS file in two and imported each half, and renamed the TitleWindow sub-class MXML file.
  
  Now fine. Odd one that.
  
  Reply Quote
  - #14 by Danyul at June 25th, 2009
    
    Good to hear. Thanks for the update!
    
    Reply Quote
#15 by Daniel at June 26th, 2009

I had the same issue as well. From my experiments, it looked like i was getting that error when there was another error or warning. So the “internal build error” was actually being caused by an issue in the warning/error reporting process in flex builder/eclipse. Mine was an actionscript project and i had a warning for ‘Default css file not found’

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- #16 by Tom Chiverton at June 30th, 2009
  
  I think you are right. The .log says:
  !ENTRY org.eclipse.core.resources 2 75 2009-06-30 12:26:28.933
  !MESSAGE Errors occurred during the build.
  !SUBENTRY 1 com.adobe.flexbuilder.project 2 75 2009-06-30 12:26:28.933
  !MESSAGE Errors running builder ‘Flex’ on project ‘fraudScoreCard-admin-client’.
  !STACK 0
  java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: “The attribute value type is com.adobe.flexbuilder.project.compiler.internal.ProblemManager and expected is one of java.lang.String, Boolean, Integer”
  at org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.MarkerInfo.checkValidAttribute(MarkerInfo.java:84)
  
  And my project does have an unused class in the CSS file, which gives a warning. Maybe this invalid type error causes a mislabeling, and so stops the build ?
  
  Reply Quote
  - #17 by Tom Chiverton at October 1st, 2009
    
    The ProblemManager patch seems to sort all this out, and now compiler warnings don’t halt the build, and show up as warnings.
    
    Woo hoo ! Go you !
    
    Reply Quote
#18 by James Ward at July 3rd, 2009

I have this same issue every time there is a compiler warning. Any workarounds?

Thanks.

-James

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#19 by Christian at July 3rd, 2009

Ubuntu 8.04 working, with eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) and FlexBuilder alpha 4.

Thank you for posting this. I even installed the flexsdk4.0.0.

Christian

#20 by Danyul at July 3rd, 2009

You’re welcome, I’m glad so many people have found it helpful.

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#21 by Steve at July 8th, 2009

I also get internal build errors, same log as above:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: “The attribute value type is com.adobe.flexbuilder.project.compiler.internal.ProblemManager and expected is one of java.lang.String, Boolean, Integer”

but I have no CSS files in my project. I have various warnings, most type declarations missing. If I butcher my code to get rid of the warnings I can get the internal build error to disappear. Eclipse doesn’t remove the warnings until I run a Project->Clean. There’s clearly bugs in the warnings system.

I have found a workaround: switch off warnings in the project properties->flex compiler settings. Not ideal. I may roll back to 3.4, we’ll see!

Steve

#22 by brownman at July 21st, 2009

thanks – man
this was a pain in the ass !!!

im so greatfull – people who develop – have no time to fight.

peace !

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#23 by Dan Martin at July 11th, 2009

Thanks so much, this worked perfectly. I was really getting frustrated dealing with 3.3, because many of the plugins I want to use no longer work with 3.3.

You know, it sure seems like this whole process could be bash scripted (including the downloads). I think I’m going to put it on my todo list.

#24 by Adnan Doric at July 13th, 2009

I don’t know if it is related, but on windows there is this bug :

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-21284

#25 by Bozh at July 17th, 2009

Thanks for the great tutorial, but I can not understand how to apply the patch. I’ll be glad if someone can explain me in more detail how to do that.

#26 by Danyul at July 17th, 2009

Steps 5-7 in Stage 2 show how to do this. You just have to follow those steps and the patch is applied.

What troubles are you having?

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#27 by Bozh at July 17th, 2009

I’m not sure where to run eclipse-galileo-fbl-patchtar file which I obtain after I axtract eclipse-galileo-fbl-patchtar.gz

#28 by Danyul at July 17th, 2009

hehe ok, I apologize for this. Wordpress renamed the file on me. if you rename the patch to eclipse-galileo-fbl-patch.tar.gz then you should be able to untar it.

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#29 by Bozh at July 17th, 2009

Thanks, now everything work

#30 by brownman at July 26th, 2009

hello there !

many there is an error message :
“classes cannot be nested”

#31 by brownman at July 26th, 2009

another note:
and there is a red icon related of eclipse errors state,
which point to the end of the top of the upper block of the main application: Main_app.mxml

Main_app.mxml
————————

<<<<–THE ERROR icon
is located to the left.

cheers!

#32 by brownman at August 7th, 2009

the console error shows:

1037: Packages cannot be nested.

#33 by brownman at August 7th, 2009

at last – I found a solution to the error: 1037

http://www.murf.us/wiki/wiki/Flex34Linux
-
it’s not clean at this nice blog but it solved me this annoying error:
—
1.
enter this dir:
cd /opt/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux
or where u installed the adobe flex plugin (lets assume eclipse installed at /opt/fb).

2.
shell command: rm -rf

remove those files:
———————–
./eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.204732.jar
&&
./com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.204732.jar
&&
./com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.204732.jar
&&
./eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.204732/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33.jar

3.
lets create a temp directory in this path(im just trying to let u follow his Article, which is a little messy):
mkdir /var/tmp/UpdateSite/
(couple of shell command: mkdir)

get those files, and put them there(mkdir /var/tmp/UpdateSite):
—————————————————-
http://www.murf.us/wiki/attach/Flex34Linux/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.214193.jar
-
http://www.murf.us/wiki/attach/Flex34Linux/com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.214193.jar
-

4.
now i copy and paste his text (but I corrected the last line)
(and u also c y i sticked with his path names)

cp /var/tmp/UpdateSite/com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.214193.jar /opt/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/eclipse/plugins/
cp /var/tmp/UpdateSite/com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.214193.jar /opt/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site/plugins/

cp /var/tmp/UpdateSite/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.214193.jar /opt/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/eclipse/plugins/
cp /var/tmp/UpdateSite/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.214193.jar /opt/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/com.adobe.flexbuilder.update.site/plugins/

cd /opt/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/eclipse/plugins
mdkir com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.214193

cd com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.214193
jar xvf ../com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.214193.jar

5.
now he runs eclipse:

cd /opt/fb
./eclipse -clean

6.
I WRITE HERE IT FOR A REFERENCE TO ME (IN THE FUTURE)
AND OTHERS WHO GOT STUCK WITH THE SAME PROBLEM.

#34 by Danyul at August 7th, 2009

Hey,
Thanks for this, I haven’t tried it yet but I appreciate the feedback for everybody who has had that problem.

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#35 by prejudice at August 9th, 2009

I used this guide for my installation. Then I got the same problem. I don’t try brownman’s solution yet, but i will for sure.

moreover, I dont know why I lose some packages. I have only “flash.errors” in mine. I wanna use “flash.net.xxx”. anyone can help me?

#36 by hemanth.hm at August 20th, 2009

Do we have the Design View this time?

#37 by Anders at September 10th, 2009

Seems this IS NOT WORKING properly. One bug remains which Adobe is not interested in solving. Perhaps you can fix it

It is possible to export the code in Flex, even if you have error on line -1 (!!), as a release build and then it will compile. Debug etc will not work.

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-21284%3Bjsessionid=733D77C1957F2E2DDAE09E5F05C380B2?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel

#38 by James Ward at September 30th, 2009

I’ve posted a patch for the ProblemManager issues:
http://www.jamesward.com/blog/2009/09/29/flex-builder-3-on-eclipse-3-5/

Now FB seems to work perfectly on Eclipse 3.5!

-James

#39 by Danyul at September 30th, 2009

James,
This looks great, I’ll test it out and make and update to my post.

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#40 by vtellier at October 1st, 2009

For people who’ve the same problem as me :
The mxml editor not working (no syntaxe coloration, and zero functionnality) with the next exception in the shell :

** DocumentTextProvider for file L/test/src/test.mxml, listener MXMLModel(23785105)
** MXMLModel for file L/test/src/test.mxml, listener DesignItemOutlineUpdater$DesignModelListener(22312030)
—- Warning: DesignModelPlugin: no editors open, but 2 objects still in use —-

This was due to the installation of axdt (that require imp, polyglot, lpg…etc) plugin, after uninstalling those it was working very well.

#41 by Iker Martin at November 25th, 2009

Working in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, with Eclipse 3.5 Galileo and the Linuxbuilder Installer alpha5 with 401 days more extension!
Thanks.
Iker Martin – Barcelona (Spain)

#42 by Danyul at November 25th, 2009

Thank you for the confirmation!

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#43 by Rodislav Moldovan at November 25th, 2009

Hi, please update your post to match for FBL Alpha 5

the point is that adobe renamed files and folders (just changed some version numbers)
———————————————————————————————
rename
com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.204732 (from patched file)
to:
com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.257568
———————————————————————————————

and

———————————————————————————————
rename
com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.204732 (from patched file)
to:
com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.257568.jar
———————————————————————————————

#44 by Rodislav Moldovan at November 25th, 2009

So, using your patch, it`s working first time, but after this – Internal build error, right click.. etc..

Using patch with ProblemManager – eclipse stops working with flexbuilder at all.. some big problem..

I used Galileo adn FBL Alpha 5 , today`s latest builds

#45 by Trifon Trifonv at November 30th, 2009

Unfortunately, the patch is not working for me as well for Alpha 5 on Eclipse 3.5. I am renaming the files as Rodislav suggested and then the FlexBuilder plugin stops loading at all, with errors like: “The installable unit com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33.translated_host_properties is missing the filename property”. I am using Eclipse 3.5.0, build 20090611-1540.

I guess the patch needs to be updated…

#46 by Douglas Barbosa Alexandre at December 1st, 2009

Thanks for the how to works perfectly to me, just an observation a easy way to install firefox 32 without the complexity of establishing a 32-bit chroot environment can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AMD64/FirefoxAndPlugins

#47 by Tom Chiverton at December 2nd, 2009

Snap. Even after
# mv com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.204732 com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.e33_3.0.257568
# mv com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.204732.jar com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived_3.0.257568.jar
I still get
org.eclipse.ui.PartInitException: No editor descriptor for id com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.mxml.MXMLEditor
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.EditorReference.createPartHelper(EditorReference.java:598)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.EditorReference.createPart(EditorReference.java:462)
in all the MXML editor windows when starting Eclipse with Adobe’s Alpha 5 release

#48 by Danyul at December 2nd, 2009

Hmm, I’ve just been using the Flash Builder port to do what I need lately. I’ll try find some time to sift through and reproduce the issues.

#49 by realgt at December 3rd, 2009

this worked great on Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 64bit

thx!

#50 by Caleb Mathis at December 3rd, 2009

Thank you for this it has been invaluable. alpha 5 on eclipse 3.5 Galileo works for me. I renamed the patch jar and directory with the new version number: 257568. one thing I found after copying the patch jar and directory, i still got the error trying to open mxml files. I fixed it as a side-effect of doing something else wrong. It appears that eclipse was using some cache that had to be reset. I edited the $ECLIPSE_HOME/links/com.adobe.flexbuilder.feature.core.linux.link and prepended the entry with path=. This was based on someone else’s suggestion. When i restarted eclipse, the flex plugin didn’t work at all. So i stopped eclipse, changed the link file back (no path=) and restarted. Now the flex plugin is recognized again and whatever cache was not allowing eclipse to recognize this patch was cleared. mxml editor works now. I tried the same on my coworker’s machine with the same result .

So after applying this patch, if you still get the mxml editor error: screw up the link file, restart eclipse, verify everything is broken, fix the link file and restart eclipse. If you’re lucky like me, this will fix your problem.

#51 by Trifon Trifonov at December 9th, 2009

Thank you, Caleb! I also managed to get the patch working for alpha 5 in Galileo 3.5 eventually. I didn’t have to break the link as you did, though. I just attempted one more install of the patch and this time it worked.

I think the problem might have been with the Eclipse plugin cache. Although I ran “eclipse -clean” after every manipulation on the Adobe Flex Builder plugin (after uninstall of alpha 4, install of alpha 5 and once more after the patch), it seems that something wasn’t reset correctly. Perhaps your links change is a way to force complete renewal of the plugin cache. Good find!

#52 by Sparky at December 11th, 2009

Installed FB alpha 5 on eclipse 3.5.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 and installed the patches. Now eclipse no longer shows Flex in the menus. Is this expected? Is there a fix for this as well?

#53 by Daniel Verner at December 31st, 2009

Thank you Caleb! Your solution with link manipulations worked for me too! I got finalli eclipse 3.5 working with flex builder alpha 5.

btw I am on ubuntu 9.10 karmic

blog.danyul.id.au