Using Vim for actionscript

The syntax file is here http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1061.

Put it in /usr/share/vim/vim72/syntax/

Edit /usr/share/vim/vim72/filetype.vim to remove the .as filetype binding to Atlas so that vim will syntax highlight your code properly.

So the line in the file that looks like this

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.atl,*.as       setf atlas

needs to be:

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.as,*.mxml        setf actionscript

Good HTML, CSS tutorial

http://www.htmldog.com/ has good tutorials for HTML and CSS. The tutorials are easy to follow and teach the syntax well.

Upgrading to Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) from Ubuntu Jaunty Jalopy (9.04)

Related: Brightness fix

11Feb2010 Update: There are mouse issues with Karmic Koala so I would suggest you hold of from updating. See http://linuxbear.blogspot.com/2010/02/mouse-issues-with-ubuntu-karmic-koala.html

You need to run "sudo update-manager" in the command prompt.

This site has better details http://www.ubuntugeek.com/upgrade-ubuntu-9-04-jaunty-jackalope-to-ubuntu-9-10-karmic-koala-beta.html

Good sound editor for Linux

Audacity is a great sound editor for linux. Allows you to import various file format, edit them and export them back into any format you like.

Homepage: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Changing package repository source in Kubuntu 9.04 'Jaunty'

KMenu -> Applications -> System -> Software Management

Click on "Software sources".
Click on the drop box that shows you your current repos. Select "Other".
Now you can select the server you want or click on "Select Best Server" to let the app do it for you.

Flash on linux using Adobe Flex 3.3 SDK

As long as you don't mind using the command line, just download the flex 3.3 SDK, unzip it. The SDK contains both windows and Linux (Unixes) binaries.

The compiler is mxmlc which resides in /bin/mxmlc.

For reading material go to the Adobe documentation page.

Getting started with Haxe on Linux

Haxe is a interesting language which supports multiple targets. I am currently interested in generating Flash SWF using Haxe.

Here are some interesting resources:
haxe.org -> The official site for Haxe.
www.cactusflower.org/learning-flash-with-haxe -> A well written tutorial.

Java in Firefox 3.5.2 aka Shiretoko on Ubuntu 9.04 'Jaunty'

As of now it seems that the only way to have Java working on Firefox 3.5.2 is to also install Firefox 3.0.

Doing: sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin also gets Firefox 3, and without this package Java does not work in Firefox.

Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 'Jaunty') on a Acer aspire 5738z laptop

Related: Brightness fix.

The laptop cost me 839 Singapore dollars which is equivalent to some 600 US dollars. I thought it was pretty good value.

Specs of the laptop are: Intel Pentium T4200 at 2Ghz, 3 GB of DDR3 Ram, 250GB HDD and Intel GMA4500M video chipset.

I did my install from a USB thumb drive. The thumb drive was created by using a Ubuntu 9.04 livecd and "usb-creator" command that comes on the livecd. After creating the factory restore disks in Vista I got on with the install.

The installation was amazingly painless. The laptop does not display a message on the boot screen on how one can get to the BIOS settings. A little bit of googling revealed that F2 during start of boot will get me there. After changing the boot order in BIOS to boot from USB, I rebooted the machine and Ubuntu's installer started off. After selecting language and such Ubuntu took me to the partitioning tool. I decided to dual boot Vista and Linux, so after setting aside space for linux, some 50GB I let Ubuntu's installer do its thing.

The partitioning and installation went through pretty painlessly and I booted into Linux and have been enjoying my time there. The performance has been good and I am not seeing any issues with the Intel Graphic chipset.

Since I prefer KDE, I switched to that using:
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop (Selected KDM when it prompted me for that).
sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop ( to remove Gnome desktop and free up some space)
sudo apt-get autoremove (To cleanup)

Benchmarks:

Kernel version: cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.28-11-generic (buildd@palmer) (gcc version 4.3.3 (Ubuntu 4.3.3-5ubuntu4) ) #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 17 01:57:59 UTC 2009

Bogomips using cat /proc/cpuinfo
CPU 0: 3989.85
CPU 1: 3989.96

$ glxgears
3884 frames in 5.0 seconds = 776.770 FPS
3937 frames in 5.0 seconds = 787.264 FPS
3913 frames in 5.0 seconds = 782.374 FPS
3951 frames in 5.0 seconds = 790.153 FPS
3948 frames in 5.0 seconds = 789.423 FPS
3966 frames in 5.0 seconds = 793.111 FPS
3960 frames in 5.0 seconds = 791.963 FPS