I have now got Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8 and Dreamweaver 8 on Linux. Note that I although these are the main components of Studio 8, I have not been able to fully install the Studio 8 suite. Although Studio is now developed by Adobe, when version 8 was released it was still under the name Macromedia.

This is the Windows version of the software, but is running directly in Linux with the help of WINE. This stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. Rather than trying to emulate Windows, WINE provides a compatibility layer, effectively providing an alternative to the DLLs and operating system calls that are required for Windows software.

I am specifically using Crossover Office which is a commercial implementation of WINE, supported by Codeweavers.
Install was not as straight forward as with most applications, but I did get it working with a bit of work.

I have updated the Codeweavers website with details of how to get it working, which is listed here.

Install process for Flash Professional 8

I have Flash Professional 8 running under crossover 6.2.0 on Ubuntu 8.04 on an AMD 64.

Install is from the Studio 8 CD. Permissions on the CD prevent installing directly from the CD (except for root – not recommended).
First copy the entire CD to the hard disk

mkdir ~/studio8
cd ~/studio8
sudo cp -r /media/cdrom .
sudo chown -R *

Install as a non-supported application, browsing to the directory as an alternate CD location. I used a Windows 2000 bottle. It will not install with Win98 bottle as the installer is not recent enough.

Launch Flash Professional install from the CD.

I have had Flash crash once (complete hang when in help documentation, used xkill and restarted). I have not done comprehensive testing, but have done some editing including Actionscript which works fine.

Installation of rest of Macromedia Studio 8

I installed Dreamweaver and Firefox into the same bottle using the full installer. This hung on the install of both Dreamweaver and Fireworks, but after killing the installer it appears to have installed correctly and works (although I’ve not tested as well as I have with Flash).

One less reason to run Windows

This gives one less reason for me to run Windows. Now that I have Windows Vista running alongside Ubuntu I know which I prefer. Ubuntu flies along in comparison to struggling with Windows Vista.

Codeweavers – home of Crossover Office

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 and is filed under Computers, Flash, General, Linux, Web Design, Web Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.