This is more of an assignment work. I'm trying to help a friend debugging his Flash animation. Now, when I'm at his place and at his MacBook, he's using Adobe Flash to create his animation, with those timelines, the AS3 editor, etc.
Now, I want to help him while I'm at home, but I don't have a Windows or Mac computer, and I don't have a Flash license (he's got his from the school he's going to).
I know about osflash.org, but can I work the same way as he does in Flash? I need those timelines, and obviously I need to compile and preview the .swf files.
I should explain, I've never worked with Flash before, and the IDE is quite weird to me. The only way I help him, is by providing general programming skills (since AS3 is just another OO language). I was thinking of installing a cracked Flash version in a Windows VM, but that's not how I'd like to work.
Is there a better solution to this?
He's doing his work in AS3, as I mentioned.
FLA is a proprietary format for Flash CS and earlier files. No, you cannot use them with Flex compiler, because the later is an OOS software. But you can tell your friend to avoid using them. It is in fact very common to use them only to generate graphic assets, but not the code. The typical workflow is to compile SWC or SWF to use as a library and to write the code in another editor.
Anyways, some practical things:
Developing AS3 proper, you can use Intellij IDEA (some people even like it and use on other OS then Linux, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of it, but it is of the same quality as the most industry-standard level IDEs)
Your another option (which I'm using) Some good soul "ported" Flash Builder for Linux (Flash Builder is originally an Eclipse plugin developed by Adobe). It's story on Linux is fogged by a mire of inconsequential decisions. Once there was a trial version, but Adobe never released it for Linux. The trial expired, then Adobe granted continuation for the trial version. Later, they seemed to abandon the product entirely. I'm not sure of its current status, but you can find it here: https://code.google.com/p/fb4linux/
Your another option, absolutely legal, but problematic: FlashDevelop, it runs considerably well in virtualization and the devs made an effort to ensure the best they can that the virtualized version runs fine. It also runs (to an extend...) under Wine. I tried the later, but I tried it a lot time ago, it was far from being perfect, but it was workable. Here's the thread at FD forum on this: http://flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=7621
FDT (from Powerflashers, a commercial IDE based on Eclipse) is said to run on Linux - never tried.
What I also used: Emacs with actionscrip-mode - it is barely a syntax highlighter. While using it I added some functions to run the compiler and debugger, but they are too crappy to share them :) seriously. So I won't.
More options:
Haxe, is another language that compiles to SWF. Less well-known, but considerably more advanced and more modern language. Besides compiling to Flash does a whole bunch of other things. I've seen it used inside MonoDevelop http://haxe.org/com/ide/monodevelop (haven't used myself). Similarly, it should be possible to use it inside FDT.
Haxe mode for Emacs (I'm currently trying to improve it, but it's not there yet), hopefully, in a couple of month it will be. Here's what I've gotten for now: https://code.google.com/p/haxe-mode/
Graphics:
It seems unlikely that you can find an editor matched to Flash CS in terms of editing vector graphics for Flash, but MXMLC (Flex compiler) can fairly well compile SVG. You can thus use Inkscape to produce some non-animated graphics... but YMMV