I’m going to say something here that I hardly like to admit but it’s the truth: Windows XP is a damn good OS. And that’s coming from someone who loathes Microsoft.

I’ve seen OS-X in action and it looks really sweet. I’ve noticed that most Flex developers I meet at conferences are using Macs these days and I was tempted, very tempted, to get an Apple laptop and start migrating in that direction. But then I was reminded of what a shitty company Apple is with all their proprietary ways and holier than thou attitude. I just can’t support a company like that. ( That’s just a personal idiocracy of mine that I happen to be very opinionated about silly, unimportant things. )

So what’s a geek to do? The two most obvious choices for an OS come from companies that I detest. And as rock solid as XP is I don’t want to use it for the rest of my life and Vista is, it’s – shiver – I try not to think about it.

But then last year at MAX07 the clouds parted over my OS woes and a ray of brilliant sunshine shown upon the stage as Adobe announced that they were working on FlexBuilder for Linux. There was singing and dancing in the isles. Salvation was at hand.

A few months ago I bought a shiny new Dell XPS M1330 laptop with Ubuntu. This was my first experience with Ubuntu aside from booting up a few times on a CD. Enough with the preamble, lets get on with setting up Ubuntu as a Flex development machine.

First things second
Go get FlexBuilder for Linux. Of course this is the FlexBuilder plugin for Eclipse so you’ll need to grab Eclipse and install it before you install FlexBuilder. Setting up Eclipse is very easy to do but if you run into problems there are a ba’zillion articles out there to help with every conceivable error since Eclipse is very popular on Ubuntu. ( Download Eclipse for Linux here. )

For me the only problem I had installing FlexBuilder was figuring out where all the files were. For instance, I have to point the installer at the Eclipse folder. I know where everything is on XP but I’m still pretty lost on Ubuntu. But after three tries I finally got it right and FlexBuilder is working just fine.

Catching AIR
I installed AIR next and haven’t had any issues at all. I’m also developing an AIR application for a client that does a lot of saving files from a web server to the local drive and uses SQL-lite. Everything seems to work exactly the same between Ubuntu and XP. I know there are a few issues but this is still a beta version of AIR on Linux.

Installing SVN for FlexBuilder
This is where I had the most trouble. I have no idea why it’s so hard to get SVN working on Eclipse. You’d think it would be as easy as: install this, then this, then this and boom – you’re done. But no. Here’s how I got it to work:

Install SVN – turn off: Integrations ( Optional )
Install Buckminster – turn off: Buckminster ( Optional )
Install Subversive – turn off: Subversive Integration Plug’in’- ( incubation )
Install Subversive SVN Connectors – turn off: Subversive SVN Connectors “You only need the Sources”

Don’t ask me if you have any questions because I don’t understand either. But SVN is working and I don’t know what I’d do without it.

A few useful sources
I know there’s nothing in this post of much use to someone installing FlexBuilder on Ubuntu but these might help:

• How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu
• Installing Flex Builder Linux alpha 3 on Ubuntu 8.04
• Ubuntu LAMP Server Guide – Configure Apache, mySQL, and cgi-bin

That last link for Ubuntu LAMP was a life saver. I had no end of failures trying to get LAMP working so that I could use AMFPHP. The author, Sam Davis, of that articles gets lots of kudos for a fine set of instructions that actually work.

I’m slowly getting used to Ubuntu. My hope is that in a year or so I’ll be able to install Ubuntu on my desktop and use it as my primary development environment. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to ditch XP completely because I need things like the Flash FLV encoder and Photoshop but eventually I’ll get there.