Submitted by Adobe has released a beta for Flash Player 9 for Linux. “While we are still working out exactly how to distribute the final Player version to be as easy as possible for the typical end user, this beta includes 2 gzip’d tarball packages: one is for the Mozilla plugin and the other is for a GTK-based Standalone Flash Player. Either will need to be downloaded manually via the Adobe Labs website and unpacked.”
Is there a 64 bit version, or will I have to install it twice?
Or edit the installer and change under main() i386 in x86_64.Than just install opera or firefox 32-bit.
No. They said it will come later after the full version 9.0 x86 version has been tested.
Been waiting months for this, i have nothing but problems with sound syncing, maybe this one fixes all that, as well as some other issues.!!! awesome news.
Works well, simple installation and finally having A/V sync is pretty neat, and not having to open my browser with “aoss” prefix to emulate oss on alsa is another plus.
An up to date flash plugin for Linux. Unfortunately, it’s still non-free – but at least there is something to use, since there isn’t a true FL/OSS equivalent- but we can work on the non-free part later.
At least now I don’t have to try and explain to my little one why he can’t go to his favorite website to play his flash games, because at 4 he just isn’t old enough to understand the whole “Free Software” thing yet.
😉
…after so many years of neglect, Adobe/Macromedia graced us with a much needed update. This dependence on one stinking corporation to move its lazy ass and release an update for their proprietary software really pisses me off. Hopefully Gnash will be able to bridge the gap one day and even surpass the official player.
Long live Open Source.
Edited 2006-10-19 16:00
While I agree with your main point, I think you’re being a bit harsh. Companies exist to make money. A flash player for Linux doesn’t exactly benefit Adobe/Macromedia very much. It’s always nice when companies voluntarily support multiple platforms, but even though you or I might feel that Linux is very important to our use of computers, the reality is that the vast majority of people don’t use it on the desktop.
I would also love to see an open source flash player/PDF reader/[insert proprietary software here] that could rival or even surpass the official/proprietary one. The good news here though is that we have a new flash player (even though it may not be completely comparable to what is available in Windows) for Linux while other options are being developed. Getting something now is as important or more so to me than hopefully getting something better in the future.
A flash player for Linux doesn’t exactly benefit Adobe/Macromedia very much.
Except their clients, the people that make god-awful websites that use only Flash navigation, have a slight problem if Linux, and other platforms don’t have the plugin. It benefits Abobe as much as having Flash for Windows.
Of course, it still highlights the issue of closed-source code; if a new platform arrives, say, Haiku, they have to wait for Adobe support too.
Gnash is really coming along, and soon enough, Adobe will realise that unless they open their software, Gnash will be the flash distributed on OSes by default (excluding MS, natch).
It benefits Abobe as much as having Flash for Windows.
You’re kidding, right? A flash player (or any other assistive/interpreter-type client for a server/creative technology) is little more than a way to ensure value for those people who buy the full/server product. Even if only 80% of the world were using Windows, and 20% of the world were using Linux as a desktop (that’s a key word) OS (we’ll ignore OS X, BSD, Solaris, etc. for simplicity), Adobe/Macromedia can still say that 4/5 people have quick and easy access to a free flash player without supporting Linux. Assuming that my numbers were accurate (I know they aren’t), your comment is like saying that 1/5 is as much as 4/5.
I use Linux. I appreciate the value that open source offers me. Having Flash on Linux benefits me personally if only for convenience. I would love to see businesses throwing more support behind open source, but I think some people are far too inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth.
What’s the population of visitors to video.google.com, youtube.com, etc? 10s of Millions?
Those are flash only (what other content do they have otherwise) sites, yet they’re linked to by a hell of a lot of portals.
Now consider how many more people would visit if Adobe had that additional “1/5” of the web-going market.
Adobe/Macromedia can still say that 4/5 people have quick and easy access to a free flash player without supporting Linux. Assuming that my numbers were accurate (I know they aren’t), your comment is like saying that 1/5 is as much as 4/5
That’s short visioned at best and plain wrong at worst.
Sayign it has as much benefits does not mean in “absolute numbers” !
The benefit, is to have more people who can view this format, thus adding value to the full product.
If what you say had any pound of truth, the Wii console could never play these Flash contents from launch time.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7719803018.html
All I see mentioned is “Linux” and processor speeds, not x86 or PPC.
And why are the specs so high? 128 megs of v-ram? No machine I own has that kind of video memory.
The bugs I thought most annoying with the previous version were the lack of support for transparency (the “point the mouse here to view this” flash ads will block the actual content from websites) and the fact that you can’t scroll with the mouse or even use keyboard shortcuts when the mouse is on the area of the Flash content. These two are not fixed on this release.
This release also introduces some problems. According to http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/09/librarian.html, you need the libssl.so and libasound.so in order to have SSL and sound support respectively.
This is wrong. For example, libssl.so may point to libssl.so.0.9.7 or 0.9.8, which are not ABI compatible and could break depending on what Adobe linked their binary against. Now let’s assume they linked their player against 0.9.7 and tested that 0.9.8 works – fine, right? Except that there’s no guarantee that 0.9.9 will also work.
OpenSSL doesn’t have a sane library versioning policy, so they could just build it statically. ALSA on the other hand doesn’t suffer from this problem, so I have no idea why Adobe is building it like this. Hopefully the final version will be fixed.
Anyway, Debian/Ubuntu users will want to install libssl-dev and libasound2-dev if they want to use all the features of this plugin.
I’m not sure they will fix these issues before the final release, specially the two bugs I mentioned first.
Post a comment to his blog about this matter otherwise he might never know it
Oh, he knows about it all right. They talk of little else over there
No mouse scrolling and no keyboard shortcuts aren’t bugs unfortunately. Flash allows developers to override these, so it is a feature. It sucks, I know.
They didn’t link their binary against either libssl or libasound. The libraries are dynamically loaded so they don’t break because of the reasons listed. So that actually isn’t a problem at all.
Edited 2006-10-19 18:11
yes!!!
now you can watch all those jamba flash commercials on the web
Adobe is taking interest in Linux…Thanks
I hate that version 7 of Flash player for Linux.
OK. I understand that some people do need to be able to view Flash content. However, as someone who *doesn’t* have any need to view Flash, Praise God (and I’m an atheist!), my exposure to flash is limited to those most annoying of banner ads that the world has ever seen, which are so ubiquitous these days. (Last time I enabled Flash and turned off the Ad Blocker extension in Epiphany, I believe I noted that OSNews was a particularly egregious offender in this vein.)
All I can say to those of you who must leave Flash turned on is that my heart goes out to you. Fortunately, though, I don’t actually feel your pain.
Did I mention that I don’t like Flash? 😉
Edited 2006-10-19 19:01
The use of Flash in web contents makes it hard (or impossible) for blind people to have a look on such pages. If there’s no “no flash version”, they’ll see nothing. Just load a web page into lynx and see, what a blind person would see.
There also are free vector based formats and formats that are capable of animations. Often I ask myself: What do you need Flash for? Couldn’t you implement something with standard tools?
Remember, script kiddies: Flash is no replacement for HTML. 🙂
I’m sad the plugin isn’t free and therefore cannot be included automatically in Linux and BSD distributions. Am I right here?
I’m sad the plugin isn’t free and therefore cannot be included automatically in Linux and BSD distributions. Am I right here?
Well, if the distribution allows non-free packages to be included (most of them do), and if the plugin allows redistribution, it can. Like Sun’s Java for example. In Debian, this would be in the “non-free” section.
at last, took its time coming.
Edited 2006-10-19 20:40
Good that Adobe tries to support non-Windows systems too with it’s software. Hopefully they will start speeding up development for Linux that isn’t such a small niche-market anymore.
I’m testing it right now and at least Opera 9.02 on Linux is crashing from time to time with websites containing Flash. So BE WARNED! Not stable at all. Audio sync works great though! Hopefully they’ll fix the stability issues quickly so it can be installed on production machines too.
Great job Adobe!
32 bit flash is most unworthy.
it would be nice if it worked in 64bit without hacks.
Spent a good time on YouTube and a few other fairly complex Flash sites and everything seems to be working fine so far. And I’m happy to report that the famous A/V sync bug is finally gone!
I’m a happy camper.
The specification for Flash SWF files is available on Adobe’s site, but behind a pretty strict licence. Most notably, you may not use the spec to write a programme for interpretting (much less creating) SWF files. The intention could not be more clear: Adobe wish their reader to be the only one in existance. But I don’t get why.
The situation is very similar to PDFs. Adobe created the format, Adobe sets the standard. Adobe give away a free (as in zero-price) reader, and make quite a lot of money selling creation/editting tools.
The existance of Xpdf and its newer derivatives in no way hurts Adobe. Neither does the native support in OS X. Indeed, one of the reasons for the success of the PDF format is that readers are available for any platform you care to mention. The fact that OpenOffice and, via PDF “printers”, any other word processor or DTP programme can output PDF doesn’t stop Adobe selling Acrobat by the bucketload.
So I’m really rather confused by their stance on Flash. I can’t see how a free software reader like Gnash would do them any harm; indeed, if it were included by default in Linux distributions, it might even increase the popularlity of the format yet further. And Acrobat proves that they would still sell just as many copies of the creation tool.
The only reason I can think that they wouldn’t do this is to protect the “purity”, so that Flash content plays the same on all platforms. But again the experience with PDF contradicts this; Adobe produce the reference PDF reader, and if a third-party reader produces different output, then it has a bug. Nobody complains to Adobe that Evince renders a PDF wrong.
So, Adobe, what’s going on? Why not open up the spec?
WOW Thanks A LOT ADOBE WE LOVE YOU ALL