Ubuntu and Actionscript Post on Dec 20, 2008

I just downloaded the Flex 3 SDK for Linux and wanted to pick up an old project I've been putting off for a while. I found some syntax-highlighting (language) files for gedit that cover mxml and actionscript but I immediately ran into a problem with opening actionscript files in my system. In the gedit file view, .as files don't even show up at all. In nautilus they do, but when I try to open one, I get an error:

The filename "Logger.as" indicates that this file is of type "Applix Spreadsheets spreadsheet". The contents of the file indicate that the file is of type "plain text document". If you open this file, the file might present a security risk to your system.

Do not open the file unless you created the file yourself, or received the file from a trusted source. To open the file, rename the file to the correct extension for "plain text document", then open the file normally. Alternatively, use the Open With menu to choose a specific application for the file. 

Applix Spreadsheet? Never heard of it. Turns out the solution wasn't too hard afterall, create a mime-type association in Ubuntu, but it did take some creating search terms on Google to finally get a result.

Another day, another Linux hack.

Cheers, Aaron

[edit] There are a couple more things you need to do to make this work. First make sure the mime-types for actionscript in both files are the same, currently one is 'application/x-actionscript' and the other is 'text/x-actionscript'. Then you need to run 'sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime' (assuming that is where you installed the mime xml files).

I'm not sure if you need to restart ubuntu for this to work, I did anyway. [/edit]