Go to System > Preferences > Appearance, choose the theme you want, click "customize", and change the background and text colors for tooltips. You can do it real-time and see your changes, which is great.

Seems like this is a core ubuntu bug, in my book.

No, I did not just sneeze at you. These are the names of the commands you should get to know if you're a bleeding edge Flex developer.

In a nutshell:

To get more advanced, specify the path to output the compiled swf to, and mark for debug:

I couldn't get this working for a while. I had a stock eclipse setup from the Ubuntu repository that I had put Flex Builder in. Next went to install PDT but couldn't get it working whether through a repository, through the eclipse update site, etc.

I didn't realize you need to run eclipse as root to install plugins. and it provides no error message telling you the installation was a complete failure- it just fails to write the plugin files silently. doh!

Here's how to get it working:

- start eclipse as root - sudo eclipse
- Help > Install new software

Here's a unique story for ya'll:

I subscribe to the YouTube API developers list, and saw a thread called "Google I/O pass". It said to post a haiku explaining why you wanted to attend, which I did (It's only funny if you code java, I'm afraid):

To my surprise I won and landed a spot on the YouTube API blog!

Look at you...you've finally got red5 built from source. Now you're getting greedy and want to try developing for it.

Indeed, building at the command line has a nice nerd-factor, but building within Eclipse is wayyyy more practical for plugin development.

We're going to add some plugins to Eclipse:

1) Open up Eclipse
2) Go to Help > Software Updates > Find & Install

I've decided it's high time to bite the bullet and learn a bit of our favorite four-letter word, Java. I've been itching to get into some serious red5 development lately.

For those of you not familiar, red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java that lets you do very cool things like flash remoting, sharing objects between Flex apps and Java, and more. What does this mean?

In-browser videochat, multiplayer games that update in real-time, live steaming video recording from your browser to my server, etc. Cool, huh?

So, my plan for getting started has been the following: