Well, I seem to have solved my problem!
After spending the last few hours reading, studying, and comparing things it turns out I can get the linux version of the IDE to program the Flora by simply editing one file, and copying one folder. In a nutshell, I had to:
1 -- Download the Adafruit version of the IDE and unzip it to a new folder.
2 -- Add the extra entries from the Adafruit version of boards.txt to hardware/arduino/boards.txt in the linux version. This defines the Adafruit Flora, as well as other Adafruit boards.
3 -- copy the variants/flora folder to arduino/hardware/arduino/variants in the linux version.
TestingI tested this by creating the test file from the tutorial, compiling/downloading it, and making sure it ran. It seems my board came with this program already downloaded, as D7 started blinking as soon as I plugged the Flora into a USB port.
When I downloaded the tutorial version, I saw the RX/TX leds blink, saw the board reset it self, and say D7 blinking at exactly the same rate. However, I then modified the delay from 1 second down to 100 milliseconds, and downloaded it again, noting that D7 now blinked 10 times faster.
CaveatsOf course,
I may have missed something, I'm very new to Arduino.
And if I did, please post! But I carefully diffed all the folders in both the Adafruit Mac version and the Arduino Ubuntu version of the IDE, and these were the 2 key differences I saw.
There are different executibles, Mac plist and other extra files, but they don't seem to matter. The IDE itself seems to be extensible and designed to allow new boards to be added without having to recompile anything. See here for more info:
http://code.google.com/p/arduino/wiki/PlatformsIn any case, thanks for reading, and I hope this helps anyone else getting started with Flora under linux.
-- Happy Mrex