Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Creating Flash Animations on Linux - part 1

Filed under
HowTos

It's all well and good that Adobe did get the Flash plug-in for Firefox/Linux going, but what we don't (and perhaps will never) have is an Adobe-supported way to create Flash animations on a Linux box.

So we have Open Source work-arounds, and I'll be exploring them one at a time. After all, those of us who earn our living with a Linux machine could stand to beef up our resumes, right?

Here's a package to get started with: Get the SWFTools package. Let's check out the "brute force" method first, with "PNG2SWF".

I made a series of .png images of a simple vector star in Inkscape, saving them as "star_01.png, star_02.png" etc. When starting a sequence of pictures like this, it's best to name the files with zero-indexing; if I used "star_1, start_2", then when I got to "star_10", the file system would sort 10 between 1 and 2, which isn't what we want.

Full Story.

Creating Flash Animations on Linux - part 2

On my way to exploring the options for Flash editing on the Linux desktop, I've run into two projects which I will mention, just because they might get somewhere someday. Both of these have led to dead ends for me - for now.

F4L for "Flash for Linux" is a project to build a GUI Flash editor for Linux, similar to Adobe's own Flash tool. As far as I got with it, I managed to grab the tarball and compile it, first with "qmake" and then "make". This produces a binary which apparently doesn't care where it runs from:

Ming is a C library for generating SWF files, which also has plug-ins for PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and apparently (from browsing source) Tcl/tk. This project appears to be active. However, it is still in 0.4 beta, and is an adventure to download and compile (particularly the plug-in extensions).

Full Story.

Creating Flash Animations on Linux - part 3

The compiler of this handy toolkit is "swfc", and it has a sort-of manual here. I say "sort of" because it's mostly examples. The examples are plentiful, however, and there's even more here. Pretty spiffy ones, too!

The examples provide you with a good opportunity to "learn like a hacker"; just copy that beautiful open source code into your favorite editor, save it as example.sc, and compile it with:

Full Story.

Creating Flash Animations on Linux - part 4 & 5

Creating Flash Animations on Linux - part 6

Told yah I'd get back to this! It took some picking around, but I have finally grokked controlling Flash elements with Actionscript, as demonstrated here.

Partly, I owe this to checking out a library book, "Foundation Flash 5" by 'friendsoft', which did give me some enlightenment into how Flash movies are done, even with the obvious handicap.

The "obvious handicap" is that, like nearly every Flash resource guide out there, it's written exclusively with the Adobe Flash IDE in mind. That just comes with the territory with proprietary technology. Hopefully, now that Flash development on the Linux desktop is showing such progress in the last few years, we'll start seeing more FOSS-focused books in the future. At this rate, I'll be ready to write one myself!

Full Story.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.