Submitted by We all more or less hate Adobe’s Flash technology for being an immense resource hog and a closed technology. To make matters worse, Flash is horribly overused in places where it shouldn’t be used. Still, it’s a technology that an operating system really must support in order to be declared usable by modern standards, since several popular websites rely on Flash to work. Haiku is now on the list of operating systems with Flash support.
The support for Flash comes courtesy of Adrian Panasiuk, who ported Gnash, an open source implementation of Flash, to Haiku. Right now, the binary is statically linked, making it rather large, but it does work.
Panasiuk is now hard at work at a plugin for Mozilla, allowing Gnash to be embedded properly in Firefox on Haiku.
which operating system exactly supports Flash? Can’t tell one from the top of my head? Except if by “operating system” you mean something else. And “OSnews” means news about … something else.
WTF? An operating system provides support for the applications that run on it. There are a number of operating systems that support programs that process flash files.
*feeds the trolls*
Exactly, all of them
If you didn’t get my hint I’ll make it very obvious: http://www.fsdaily.com/
I can’t decide myself: should I congratulate Adrian or should I cry in despair (another Flash-hater BeOS-user here)?
I think I’ll do both.
Well definately I think congratulations are in order. Personal dislike aside, Flash support is something users generally expects these days.
Actually, the true problem is that flash support is something that webmasters expect nowadays.
I feel that other formats are worse/more evil. Realplayer was more evil than flash, or imagine if ActiveX had really gained widespread usage on the web as Microsoft originally intended, or think of all those radio stations which offer their content only in WMA or RealAudio…
Edited 2009-02-25 14:05 UTC
Once the Mozilla plugin is done, I can see myself using Haiku as my main OS since it will have everything I need to be productive.
A web browser and flash?
J/K!! And, I love Haiku. (Seriously, I do).
Fixed your sentance for you.
I would like to give you a +1 (Funny), specially since I don’t see why you got a -1, but I’m unable to do so, as I had already posted a comment.
(weird mod limitation).
Yes, and no hamsters was harmed in posting that comment.
First, that looks like it was a lot of work to get working. Well done.
Personally, I have been abale to avoid having to use any site that requires Flash to work.
YouTube in particular, I use the Firefox media plugins to point out the direct location of the .FLV files and download them to my machine to play using VLC, and also lets me play them off-line. (This is very useful on days that the internet access seems to be running a little slow).
Still if this does help my get access to CrunchyRoll it will be worth it to me.
It’s nice to see the headway that Haiku is making I tried the latest Senryu release and I have to say I like what I see so far. I am looking forward to being able to install it on a machine as drivers mature. I already have a BeOS and Zeta machines that I use all the time.
I should know this, but I don’t: Does this require gcc4-built Haiku currently?
I’m guessing it does based on some previous discussions about Boost, etc., but then I’m not sure…
Looking through the notes, looks like 20+ package dependencies ported in order to build gnash? damn… go on a diet or something.
From the download page:
“All these files require a Haiku-gcc4 or hybrid build.”
Woa! 135MB! I believe that pretty much doubles the size of your Haiku distro sans Gnash. Recent Haiku pre-alpha images with BeZilla and some smaller apps is about 100MB, packed.
This is very good news indeed.
BeOS had a thirdparty flash player that worked fine at the time, what happened with that? (superseded probably)
You’re referring to this: http://www.bebits.com/app/1214
It was released by The General Coffee Company Film Productions who obtained a license from Adobe to redistribute a port of Flash Player for BeOS. I’m guessing the license to redistribute actually cost them some money, not to mention the effort spent to port Flash Player in the first place.
I’m not even sure that Adobe licenses these types of projects any longer, and if they do, I’m not sure there’s a single person/company interested in paying the necessary license fees to port Flash Player to Haiku.
I have to imagine the original ported code is gone and/or useless at this point.