Well, if you're opening and editing the file using Flash, then what you need to do is go to File->Publish (something like that).
Your other questions:
Flex is for building Rich Internet Applications. It has your basic GUI controls and all that. It uses Actionscript MXML as its underlying languages.
Flash is more for creating animations and games. It does have some premade GUI components, but they don't look as traditional as Flex's.
The "CS" after Flash is "Creative Suite", which is part of Adobe's product line (with photoshop, dreamweaver, etc). The "CS" was added to it after Adobe bought Flash from Macromedia. If you see any versions of Flash without a CS after it (like flash MX), it is a very old version.
Your questions about file formats:
.as is a file that contains
Actionscript. This is the programming
language used in Flex and Flash.
.fla is a raw movie project file. This contains all of your graphical assets, as well as .as files and others.
.swf is a compiled movie. This is what a .fla turns into when you do the step I told you to do. This is what you download when you watch a flash video online.
Hope this helps too (for the sake of google search i came from):
In order to do trace, you need the debugger version of Flash Player from
http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html (look for "debugger" version specifically - they are hard to spot on first look)
Then an mm.cfg file in your home containing
ErrorReportingEnable=1 TraceOutputFileEnable=1 MaxWarnings=50
And then you are good to go - restart the browser. When traces start to fill in, you will find the log file in
~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/Logs/flashlog.txt
Something like
tail ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/Logs/flashlog.txt -f
Should suffice to follow the trace.
Best Answer
You should really spend an afternoon with the docs for flash player's security and javascript stuff. I think it would really help you in understanding how this all works.
Some clarification is needed for your q:
You say you are running a server on your linux box, but your swf is on a windows machine? Can you explain that setup? (it shouldn't matter that they are linux vs. windows, only what domain they are served from (or local machine name).
If your local machine is http://localhost
and your windows machine is http:// mywindowsbox/
then you'll need to allow access to the html page that the swf is embedded on, by adding allowscriptaccess=always in your embed code.