Flex Builder 3: Serial Number is Invalid

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Flex Builder 3: Serial Number is Invalid

Last week I applied for the Free Flex Builder 3 For Unemployed Developers so that I could build Flex applications on my new Mac Book Pro, and in two short days I received an email with my new Professional edition license key.

I had been using the trial version of Flex Builder 3, which had been installed from my Mac administrative account. Upon entering the new serial number I was greeted with a contradictory message in the Flex Builder 3 Activation dialog:

Current License: Professional Edition - Educational
Serial Number is Invalid

Flex Builder determined that it was a Professional Edition license key, but then indicated that the number was invalid, complete with a green check mark indicating it was valid. That doesn't make any sense at all.

I suspected that problem was somehow with permissions so I did a bit of Googling to find this recent post on the official Adobe Flex Team Blog which indicated at least that the Flex Builder license should be stored at:

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flex/license.properties

However, when I examined my file system I discovered that the Adobe directory did not contain a Flex subdirectory, and therefore no license.properties file.

To test permissions, I then launched Flex Builder with the sudo command to permit Flex Builder to run with root privileges. My assumption was that when I ran Flex Builder with my regular administrative account it was not able to write the license file to disk, and starting FB with sudo should allow it to do so. You can see that when run as sudo, Flex Builder wrote the license file to disk with the user and group of root / admin.

sudo /Applications/Adobe\ Flex\ Builder\ 3/Flex\ Builder.app/Contents/MacOS/FlexBuilder
ls -l /Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Flex
-rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 114 Apr 8 17:06 license.properties

I was pleased to find out that this was in fact the problem, and Flex Builder now accepted my license and indicated that it was Professional Edition and valid.

posted on 8 April, 2009 at 5:35 PM.
ColdFusion, Flex | Comments (9)

Comments

Wow, nice bit of sleuthing, Steven!

comment by Tom Mollerus, posted at 4/8/09 6:59 PM

Thank you! Works just as you described.

comment by Robert, posted at 4/16/09 8:37 PM

I had the same symptoms even though I did have a license.properties file. My problem was that I was trying to enter the serial number when logged in as a user that was not a sys admin account. All I did was login using my regular account (with sys admin privileges) and it worked just fine. (of course running as sudo is roughly the same thing)

Thanks for the post which helped me solve this.

comment by Jim, posted at 5/28/09 5:09 PM

This worked great with 1 caveat. When I quit eclipse it save my workspace and changed ownership on some of the workspace config files. I had to go change those permissions back to the regular user.

comment by Shawn Morel, posted at 12/10/09 11:24 PM

Great post Steven, thanks! this fixed my problem. my license.properties file was owned by a user that was not in use anymore. so i chowned it with my current user and it worked fine:
sudo chown insertUserNameHere license.properties

thanks for your help!

comment by Ben Wigton, posted at 2/18/10 6:22 PM

Great! I asked Adobe about that problem over chat and phone, but they couldn't help me out! They just told me rubbish... Really great solution!

comment by Markus Häcki, posted at 3/10/10 4:37 AM

Thanks for the help on this. Adobe tech support was useless in getting this solved.

All I actually needed to do was create the folder and make myself the owner of the folder using the following 2 Terminal commands (be sure and substitute your user short name for )

sudo mkdir /Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Flex
sudo chown !$

I then was able to enter my serial number successfully.....

comment by Wade Ford, posted at 3/11/10 1:02 AM

doh I entered xml tags in the prev post

All I actually needed to do was create the folder and make myself the owner of the folder using the following 2 Terminal commands (be sure and substitute your user short name for #user#)

sudo mkdir /Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Flex
sudo chown #user# !$

I then was able to enter my serial number successfully.....

comment by Wade Ford, posted at 3/11/10 1:05 AM

@Wade - Glad I could help! Thanks for letting me know it worked for you too.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 3/11/10 9:40 AM

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I live west of Boston and work as a Software Engineer with ColdFusion and Flex, specializing in Linux. Recently I graduated in Professional Digital Photography from CDIA.