If you’re like me, you love logfiles. So you see the “trace” command and think “Sweet! I can log!” But then, if you’re like me, your hopes are dashed as nothing actually happens. Well, it’s probably due to one of two reasons:
- You don’t have the debug version of the Flash player installed
- You haven’t activated logging
Here’s how you achieve this state of logging nirvana:
- Go to the Flash debug player install page and install the relevant debug player for your platform. If you’re lucky enough to be a Linux user, you can enjoy the following additional steps: download the Linux Flash Player, find the file and run “tar xvfz flash_player_9_linux_dev.tar.gz”, then run “tar xvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz”, and then run “./flashplayer-installer”, and then delete “.mozilla/firefox/z270avvr.default/xpti.dat”. Easy!
- Go to the Debug Flash Player Configuration Page and create your mm.cfg file (in ~/mm.cfg for Linux) containing:
ErrorReportingEnable=1
MaxWarnings=0
TraceOutputFileEnable=1 - Restart Firefox and it should start spitting out logs into the logfile location stated on the page (~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/Logs/flashlog.txt for Linux)
So… not *quite* as easy as a checkbox somewhere, but not horrendous. But there is a slight problem with this: it, basically, doesn’t work. Or, it only sorta works — I have to keep deleting the flashlog.txt file or nothing happens… I’m still sorting it out. Fun!
[Update] Aha, that’s the story: it’s working fine, but it deletes and remakes the logfile every time. Sorta annoying, but you can get around this with “tail –follow=name flashlog.txt”. This will tail the file like “tail -f”, but will reload it if it gets deleted.
