Walk Alone

Understanding megacorps is difficult. Adobe refuses to release a Flash plugin for 64 bit browsers. Sun refuses to release a Java plugin for 64 bit browsers.

Don’t tell me it is not possible - the only reason I’m not using Gnash is it fails to play quite a lot of Flash files. It is still in development and works up to SWF 7; which means (I think) it can play files compatible with Flash 7. But, what about Flash 9? And Flash 8? Believe it or not, services like Youtube and applications like FusionCharts are quick to adopt the latest and greatest version of Flash out there. And Gnash is playing catch up.

So, I had two options; first was to install a 32 bit Firefox build - icky. Tried it for a few weeks - no go.

The second option was to install a 32 bit distro in a VM. It seemed like a good idea. I even got ready to install a bare bones, minimal Ubuntu with a lean and mean window manager, to speed up the VM a bit. Then I discovered (to my utter shock) that enabling network communication between the host and guest OSes and allowing both to access the net; while possible, was definitely not my cup of tea. I needed this to work because I wanted to test an application running FusionCharts - I needed the guest to access Apache running on my host.

Then happily, I discovered a third option - nspluginwrapper.

What this beauty does is put a wrapper on 32 bit plugins to allow them to be used by 64 bit browsers. All you have to do is install this package and then the Flash plugin - as shown here. But for some reason, Ubuntu’s repos have messed up with the MD5 sum for the Flash plugin. Result - the plugin doesn’t get installed.

Then, a guy who calls himself Kilz, came to the rescue - by providing a script and DEB packages to do the job. He is the man, absolutely! I looked through the thread and the bash script. Cleaned up the system - removed all previous Flash installs. Followed the commands in the script. And I was done.

But having to do all this sucks. How much effort does a 64 bit plugin take to develop?

I don’t think anyone needs an introduction to Eclipse. I had been putting off its deployment on my home machine for the most trivial of reasons - laziness. Well, I installed it today.

First and foremost, I must say, go for the latest. No matter which Linux distribution you use (or OS for that matter), go for Eclipse 3.3, Europa, the latest version of Eclipse out there. I tried to install PDT on Eclipse 3.2, Callisto, which was smoothly installed via Synaptic. PDT requires WST 2.0.0. Callisto offered 1.5.0, I think. So, Europa is the only way to go.

If you are on a 64 bit system, go for the 64 bit builds from the downloads page. The page detects your OS and architecture, just in case you don’t care to check it yourself. At the very least, your Eclipse and JVM should be of the same architecture. Sun’s Java is preferred. I know. I kept trying to install a 32 bit Eclipse build on a 64 bit system with a 64 bit JVM. Typical case of PEBKAC.

Well, first, I put in Sun JDK 6. These three commands from the Eclipse page of the Community Ubuntu Documentation did the trick. Th last two commands ensure that, if you have more than one JVMs, Sun Java comes first.

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
sudo update-java-alternatives --list
sudo update-java-alternatives --set java-6-sun

Then, it was time to install the plugins - PDT (PHP), EPIC (Perl), QuantumDB (MySQL), JSEclipse (Javascript) and Subclipse (SVN). QuantumDB requires the JDBC driver for your choice of database. For the rest, dependencies are satisfied by Eclipse’s plugin installation utility. Just select the Europa Discovery site along with the plugin’s own update site. When the dependencies crop up, expand all the sections of the Discovery site. Then click the ‘Select Required’ button and the required dependencies get selected. Slick - the closest anything has ever got to the apt-get utility.

And you are all set to get more productive.