Acumen Development

My eye balls nearly popped out of my head when I stumbled across Adobe’s alpha of flex builder for Linux. I say beta, but it does everything I want, is faster and seems even more stable than flex builder in windows. The fact this is released as a plugin for eclipse (the windows and mac versions of flex builder are built on eclipse) is quite a break from Adobe’s previous behaviour. But then so was releasing the flex SDK for free!

Anyway as a native Ubuntu user I’ve been enjoying this immensely. The only disappointing thing is that Adobe have seen fit once again to only bless Linux users with 32bit binaries. Now I think that it’s pretty hard to get a new pc or laptop that doesn’t have 64bit support, so why the reluctance?

I managed to get it working in the end of course. But it meant taking off my 64bit version of eclipse, and installing 32bit version of this and Firefox. The instructions were all clear enough on adobe’s site. What makes me laugh is the fact it might have just been easier for them to build a 64bit version rather than wasting time writing a detailed HowTo.

In other related 64bit Linux news, I got my dirty little paws on a 64bit Ubuntu package! Great stuff Skype, glad to see you listened to everyone who relentlessly bombed your forums.

Ok this is my last Ubuntu fanboy post for a while I promise. I just wanted to spread the love.

Ok it’s a problem. It’s the effect of having been stuck in Windows for so many years. Trying time and again to change to linux but always having problems with cross platform compatibility, portability, finding and implementing functionality. Now a lot of these problems haven’t been solved by Ubuntu itself, in fact all flavours of Linux have come a huge way in the past 5 years in improving the general user experience. Addtionally exotic hardware support has been growing too, so don’t get me wrong, I know that all the perks are not because of Ubuntu, but it’s stepped into the fray at exactly the right time.

This is the first OS that I can show to inexperienced people with pride, showing that features can be added by them with no help by me. But most of all this is the first OS I’ve enjoyed using, my laptop now makes me happy, not frustrated. All those little things, like having ssh filesystem access from the desktop, that just makes my job so easy. It helps now and again being an old hand with the CLI, which always intimidates new users who want to go a bit deeper into Linux.

My next adventure will be installing kvm, I’m going to set up a freebsd testbed on my laptop. Reports here later as to my success.