Gah!
As you may have gathered from our philosophy here that I am a Linux user. Specifically I run Ubuntu. Usually it is a pretty nice running OS and I rarely have any issues with it. That is not the case recently.
Back in April, Ubuntu released version 11.04 and it has been nothing but frustration. The first problem that happened when I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 was all the sound was shut off. I was not able to get any sound from any part of the OS. As far as I could tell in my hours of research and debugging was that everything was fine.
Finally after about 2 weeks of no sound, I stumbled across a suggestion that I check user permissions. So I did and there it was. Ubuntu decided in its infinite wisdom that no users should be able to hear sound unless you explicitly tell it they can. Seriously, why is that even a setting. Is there some reason why you would want certain users not to be able to play audio? Is there some reason why this setting would have been set to off by default for all users? I still can’t get start up sounds to play, but I at least have sound when logged in.
Ubuntu 11.04 has given me some other problems. I use Eclipse with the AXDT plugin for my Flash development. This set up has treated me well for the last year or so. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 11.04 did something that royally screwed this set up. I can still program and compile but now the built in SWF viewer no longer works. Everytime I compile it brings up a promt asking me to find an application to run the swf (at least that is what I think the file browsing pop up wants). However, I cannot find anything that it will accept as a valid selection. So I have to cancel out of that popup every time I compile and then navigate to the compiled swf in Firefox to test it out. This is not an ideal solution.
So I decided that I would reinstall AXDT to see if that works. But now AXDT is giving me fits. They changed their update site and now it is telling me that it has a dependency on the XText plugin. So I tried installing that and it tells me it is missing a dependency. Why can’t these blasted plugins be self contained?
So my next attempt to rebuilding my development environment is to download the latest version of Eclipse, Helios. Ubuntu repository overlords have deemed in their infinite wisdom that this is not something that the Ubuntu community wants or needs so they do not provide it for easy installation. So I now have to download and install it by hand. We’ll see how that goes.
My time is money. I haven’t had as much free time recently as i would have liked to have had. The little time I have to program should not be taken up with OS and IDE problems that are not of my creation. I hope that this new version of Eclipse will solve my latest round of problems and I can get back to dedicated development.
