OK. So for anyone else having this issue, when Adobe decides to piss on us Linux Flash developers again:
This time it was making my Flex Builder Alpha expire. First it took hours ( and two unhelpful Adobe reps ) to realize that there was a new alpha available for Flex. I thought they were trying to make me buy a license. So I figured, oh, cool, it'll be a cinch to upgrade. But I was incorrect.

Upgrading Flex builder linux to alpha 5, on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10:

Here's a unique story for ya'll:

I subscribe to the YouTube API developers list, and saw a thread called "Google I/O pass". It said to post a haiku explaining why you wanted to attend, which I did (It's only funny if you code java, I'm afraid):

To my surprise I won and landed a spot on the YouTube API blog!

Boo-ya! Finally got this working! My "Hello world" red5 app is attached...It's nothing fancy (adds two numbers together and spits it out in the eclipse debug console), but I couldn't find a good template to work off of that used red5 v.8 and Flex w/ AS3, so here it is.

You'll need Adobe Flex Builder set up in Eclipse to run this.

Installation:
1) Unzip myapp.tar_.gz and place myapp/ in ~/projects/red5/dist/webapps
2) Unzip red5test.tar_.gz and place into your eclipse workspace.

Look at you...you've finally got red5 built from source. Now you're getting greedy and want to try developing for it.

Indeed, building at the command line has a nice nerd-factor, but building within Eclipse is wayyyy more practical for plugin development.

We're going to add some plugins to Eclipse:

1) Open up Eclipse
2) Go to Help > Software Updates > Find & Install

I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to properly configure my Ubuntu system for red5 application development. If all you need is red5 server, go ahead and use the prepacked .deb installer.

However, if you want to build your own red5 apps (or have a generally masochistic personality) you're gonna want the bleeding edge red5 from trunk (v .8 r3 at time of writing).

I've decided it's high time to bite the bullet and learn a bit of our favorite four-letter word, Java. I've been itching to get into some serious red5 development lately.

For those of you not familiar, red5 is an Open Source Flash Server written in Java that lets you do very cool things like flash remoting, sharing objects between Flex apps and Java, and more. What does this mean?

In-browser videochat, multiplayer games that update in real-time, live steaming video recording from your browser to my server, etc. Cool, huh?

So, my plan for getting started has been the following: