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:

UPDATE: I gave up on this approach and moved back to Eclipse Europa 3.3

Much to my dismay, there were just too many bugs trying to get FB to support 3.5 correctly. I had it mostly working, but there are unresolved issues with the ProblemManager Class that caused consistent "internal build error" messages and generally completely unacceptable error reporting.

I don't know about you but the scope of my Flex work is such that I need top-notch error-reporting. And I really don't like having to apply multiple patches to get my IDE to a half-functional state.

OK. So for anyone else having this issue, when Adobe decides to piss on us Linux Flash developers again:
This time it was making my Flex Builder Alpha expire. First it took hours ( and two unhelpful Adobe reps ) to realize that there was a new alpha available for Flex. I thought they were trying to make me buy a license. So I figured, oh, cool, it'll be a cinch to upgrade. But I was incorrect.

Upgrading Flex builder linux to alpha 5, on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10:

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: