Installing the free Flex SDK and Java JDK 1.5 SDK

So I have the not-so-unique but incredibly exciting none the less experience of attending FlashForward 2006 in Austin, TX. It's incredible-- a whole crowd of folks just like me: creatives, innovators, software developers, musicians, artists.. I love it.

My interest was piqued by Flex 2 by a brilliant presentor and Flex developer Aral Balkan. I mostly appreciated that he didn't talk designer-- he spoke geek.. Real, hardcore OOP. And here's what I gathered: Flex is simply incredible. But I donna gotta no moolah, so I intend to go the cheap route: FREE Flex SDK and Edit Plus for writing MXML. We'll see how long I last like this, but I just want to get my feet wet.... that CS degree has got to be good for something :D

So I ran into a few stumbling blocks thus far, and here are my experiences and solutions:

Downloading the Free Flex SDK:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
Click that Developer tab and select Download Flex SDK. You'll need a macromedia/adobe user/pass but registration is free (and you should already have one, right?).

Installing the Flex SDK:
http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flex/2/install.html#installingflex2sdk

Downloading the free JDK 1.5:
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/
Find JDK 5.0 Update 8 and click Download. I then got jdk-1_5_0_08-windows-i586-p.exe, "49.52 MB"

Installing JDK was a troublesome bother for me at first. I kept getting an error talking about Invalid drive over and over! I overcame this remnant/ghost network drive by mapping my own c drive to that disconnected, phantom network drive like this: \\MyComputerName\c$ The C: drive doesn't even need to be shared for this to work.

I hope this helps somebody....