Developing Adobe Flash Actionscript on Linux

There are some possebilities out there. But they matched not my needs. What i simply wanted ist a way to develop Actionscript 1. Yes it's true, i want to develop Actionscript 1 ;-). If it is necessary i would develop AS3 or maybe AS2 but for most my needs AS1 is the perfect choice, it's compatible with JavaScript, dynamic and has it's focus on productivity and not on overestimated aspects like type safety.

Flash 8 is my current Flash-IDE. I have tried to run it with wine but with limited success, it was very slow and buggy. So i tried to run Flash 8 from a virtual Windows XP Machine, it's not as fast as with an native Window XP but it is really fast enough to me. It seems that it's zero point three times slower.

So far so good. As an advanced actionscript coder i don't wanted to code my AS1 inside the Flash 8 IDE, because this slows my hacking workflow about factor 3 or 4 down. This is because of the integrated Editor, which is definitly not worth to work with for more than 10 Minutes. My editor of choice is SciTE or SciTE-st. But i don't wanted to code on the virtual Windows XP. I wanted to use my nicely configured Linux version SciTE-st to code my AS1. But how would i test my movies in the virtual machine, without copying Actionscript files and switching to it.

The solution is simple. I installed a ssh server on Windows XP. Installed Robin Debreuil's Flush. And here we go. I simply written a task which copies the actionscript files with scp to the virtual machine and than executes flush on the virtual machine. Flush tests the movie inside the Flash IDE. Great. The last thing to do was to configure the Editor to run this task if i hit the F5 key. So the workflow is really speeded up. No window switching any more, just edit the Actionscript and hit F5 to see movie and output in the virtual machine.

Links
Flush for Flash 8
http://www.flashfanatiker.de/blog/archives/000051.html
Original Flush Homepage
http://www.debreuil.com/flush/
The Company behind Flash
http://www.adobe.com/
Free ssh server for Window XP
http://www.freesshd.com/
Tool for automating tasks like make or ant, but with an uncircumstantial syntax
http://rake.rubyforge.org/
My favourite Editor
http://scintilla.org/SciTE.html
My favourite Version of my favourite Editor
http://caladbolg.net/scite_st.php

Tips
Configuring freeSSHd has taken some time, this is what i have done:

1. Check the following settings in the FreeSSHDService.ini file, it contains all configuration you can also access through the ui
   
2. SSHNewConsole=0 - i needed to deactivate because i had some problems executing commands via ssh, this was on freeSSHd-Version 1.2.0
3. SSHPasswordAuth=1 - disables password authentication
4. SSHPublickeyAuth=2 - set public key authentication to required
5. SSHPublickeyPath=C:\SOMEPATH\ssh_public_keys - set the directory in which freeSSHd searches for files with public keys. Each file has to be named after it's user.
6. You need to create an user within FreeSSHd, thats all