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Flash 7 for Linux Released
molarmass192 writes "Looks like Macromedia has finally made good on their word and provided Linux with a current version of Flash player. Improvements over Flash 6 include a speed boost and support for SOAP. Here's the requisite download link. I took a few seconds to get it set up and the response is noticeably snappier than version 6. In particular, the audio/video sync problems in version 6 seems to have been taken care of. Now, I wonder where they hid that Shockwave player for Linux?"
Looks like those Linux users finally get all the fun.
... they'd release the authoring tool in a Linux version?
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Now, I wonder where they hid that Shockwave player for Linux?
/dev/null
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mobile porn
It's also available as packages for all major distributions from here..
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Tried the install package on SuSe 9.0 and works like a charm. The only drawback is that the user needs to know where their mozilla/firefox is installed. Works noticably faster than before (I also have the feeling that it eats much less CPU time). Next improvement: no flash at all! ;-)
By chance I downloaded the newest version as I was reinstalling everything else too. But it still has "jerks" whenever I play a flash game. My slower windows box doesn't have this problem. The problem is reproducible on all three of my linux machines, no matter the processor speed. It makes it especially difficult to play a game like this since there are unexpected jerks in movement.
Flash 7 for Linux Released I almost jumped in joy thinking that Flash will be released natively for Linux. Flash is the application itself, Flash player is the standalone player and web browser plugin. Oh well.
Where is my PPC flash player? Where oh where is it!?!
Does it finally exist? I do so hope....
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
No PPC version again I fear. At least I couldn't find it.
Bummer!
I've had many emails passed back and forth with Macromedia tech support .. there are versions for most Unix implementations, and MacOS 9 and X .. but not for Linux/PPC *sigh* .. it wouldn't be that difficult to run just one more compile, would it ?
its not the flash player, its the website designers that disable zooming in/quality control etc, so stupid users wont messup the site by zooming it in or messing up the quality.
..and boy is it ugly! ;)
props to Macromedia on this one.
It's made it through (currently) six repetitions of Badgers with excellent synchronization (as opposed to version 6 not even making one). Hell, everything's so crisp and fluid... it's beyond further words.
Has anyone tried this speedup trick in other distro's? I doubt that it's Gentoo specific:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=176167
The gist of it is setting an environment var:
export FLASH_GTK_LIBRARY=libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
People in the Gentoo forum are claming massive speed increases when viewing flash. I'm about to go try it now...
--Ajay
It's nice to see companies supporting Linux, but unfortunately I can't use it until they make a amd64-version since 64-bit browsers can't use 32-bit plugins..
The Linux kernel can run 32-bit code but can't link to 64-bit code so to have a 32-bit browser I'd have to also have 32-bit versions of all the libraries it depends on, and their dependancies, all the way down to glibc and ld.so.. Not worth it.
Is it possible to run isolated 32-bit code inside a 64-bit program? Something like an exec32() libc-function or something? To make 64-bit Mozilla run Flash and make 64-bit MPlayer load win32-codecs.. I'm sure you'll have to make some kind of wrapper-code to convert int-sizes etc when sending/getting data from/to the library, but would it be possible at all?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
The parent poster has an excellent point. If these developers write quality code, and I have no reason to suspect that they do not, why not drop a few hundred bucks on a single PPC box that you can start a GCC make on, and let it run for a week if need be?
At the very least, you would have an excellent testbed. AND, IIRC, the US Navy is moving to PPC/Linux. Imagine the wargames... Flash/Shockwave Battleship!!!
Macromedia Sales: Would that not make it WAY easier to land a HUGE contract with the Defense Dept?
bash: rtfm: command not found
The menus can be programatically controlled by the Flash designer.
Some designers opt to not have the menu show up in their Flash, and set this in the containing page's source code.
So if you a menu doesn't pop up on right click, it isn't Macromedia's fault, its how the web designer wants it to be.
And the Linux/Arm one ? And the Linux/alpha one ? etc.
This is the proprietary magic : you just don't have the control or the possibility to see them come unless Macromedia themselves choose to release one.
A simple and good reason not to use neither encourage or support this kind of proprietary, non-standard format.
theefer
This could of course just be me but it seems that the sync of video/audio is still not exactly right. I tested it by running this clip http://www.cybermoonstudios.com/8bitDandD.html but alas it didn't work. perhaps I should remove the v.6 plugin first. Oh well.
This trick is no longer needed after upgrading to version 7. The plugin will work fine with both gtk1 and gtk2 version of Mozilla / Firefox.
Why would you want it?
Flash is internet pollution. (X)HTML is lighter-weight and thus faster, more accessible for people with disabilities, and just generally less crap. Plus, Google can tell you about the content of (X)HTML pages, but nothing, from Google to grep, can parse the content of a Flash movie. Flash has a nice little niche for silly animations and games, but it has become a cancer on the web as a navigation and content-presentation interface. An increase in its reach isn't something to celebrate.
Now seems a good time to introduce flashblock. Very ironic, isn't it?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This is one of the few times you'll hear me honestly ask "is it open source?" I ask because I would love to see an IRIX version of this for my Silicon Graphics Octane workstation, and I know it's not going to happen otherwise. The IRIX world is stick at version 5 with few alternatives.
Yeah, yeah, I know, flash sucks. But sometimes you need to have it to visit certain sites. Sure beats having to fire up my PC just o look at the newest movie site.
And yes, SGIs are oldschool. But Octanes are pretty cheap on eBay and are becoming common with we hardware collectors (if you're not that type, you probably know one... house full of computers with at least one working Amiga and probably a NeXT cube too). And it makes for a great main workstation!
It's not the developers' computer. It's MY computer, and a lot of my hardware is "old" and CANNOT HANDLE anything higher than "Low Quality"! And not giving me a freaking VOLUME KNOB is absolutely ridiculous.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
"Looks like Macromedia has finally made good on their word and provided Linux"
GNU/Linux works on various platforms although the x86 port is the most common. I don't see x86 anywhere in the announcement, do you? If we had the source we had the freedom to compile it on any arch and OS we wanted to. A proprietary software package isn't a contribution to us if our goal is freedom.
It is the problem with non-free software.
Please disconnect from the internet immediately.
It's impossible that your connection to Slashdot or whatever is only accomplished through "Free" software.
http://blog.astyran.sg
Mozilla with flash player 7.0 opens the flash animations, in the same way as it used to do with flash player 6.0. I could'nt find any difference with the new plugin. If somebody could tell me a way to find the difference, it would be great.
Dreamweaver? What kind of programmer uses Dreamweaver?
I dunno. I'm not even that old; I'm 21. I've been programming since I was 9, and compared to a lot of people that's still nothing to how long they have been. Either way, I absolutely cannot stand that damn program.
How does it pay for itself?? I can understand the color coding helps, but you can get a much less bloated program to do color coding.
WYSIWYG editors for true website design are a waste.
I stand by my theory that you put up your best Dreamweaver man, and your best hand coder, and ask them to fix a problem and then see who pays for themselves.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
Just toss those two files into /usr/lib/browser-plugins and away you go.
Works fine with Mozilla, Firefox, also.
Didn't test it with Epiphany etc.
San Diego Padres, 100 Park Blvd, San Diego CA 92101
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by
Thanks
M.
First of all, relax.
Second of all, you're full of shit, it's not your computer, it's their content, in some cases artwork, and they can decide how they want it viewed/experianced.
You can choose to not view it or view it as the artist intended.
As for a volume knob, it seems that windows programs stopped having them a while ago (or if they did they simply controlled the system volume) and AFAIK, most linux programs never did (the onese that exist simply control the system mixer)
Buttsex.
ARG... Still no 64bit release... this is really anoying.. If I want to use 64bit native browser I can't have flash... grrr...
AEnertia
Witty, tag line goes here
I suppose you never look at Macromedia's 10-Q filings and don't have stock in this company?
If you did you'd note that the concern about bankruptcy is not one listed.
At any rate, the close source of their tool which is becoming ubiquitous within the Web Communities gives Macromedia a business advantage. Why the hell would they open source this? This makes as much sense as Apple open sourcing Quartz/Quartz Extreme or QuickTime.
You don't base your company around a non-open-source model and then when you are strong give away your crown jewels of technology, just to satisfy the ideology of the open-source community.
Perhaps if they redesigned flash to leave a necessary portion open-sourced and then made money off of custom tools than we might see a change of business.
In your haste to rant about how much you hate everyone else on then Intarweb, you've missed or ignored a pretty major point: Flash is just a tool. How about this:
HTML is a lead lined cudgel with which talentless unfunny people can create their poorly designed and impossible-to-navigate websites. (or, if they're really talentless, they just ship them off to sites like geocities.com) I have personally lost count of the number of times I've had my browsing experience ruined by an annoying as hell animated gif banner ad spawning in the middle of my screen, or a homepage so slowed and crippled by dynamic HTML that I left and never returned.
I suspect most of us would agree with that to an extent, but we don't vow never to look at a webpage again.
Some Flash is very good. Deal with it, move on, use the appropriate browser/plugin to make Flash content optional.
Game dev and music blog
Don't like it? Don't install it or use it. You are not being forced to use flash so how on earth does this impact you?
The fact is not all uses of flash are bad - as an animation technology used by people who aren't idiots (eg Homestar Runner) it is quite good. So having continued support for Flash on Linux is a good thing - if you personally hate all flash then just don't use it! That simple!
Barto
I wonder where I can try that out... It seems that in the past few months I have adblock'ed all flashes on the sites I usually visit :)
I have a hardware volume knob. It's right there on the front of my speakers. I don't know of any computer speakers, ever, that haven't included a bigass knob right on the front. Maybe I'm missing something?
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
I flat out refuse to download Flash until Macromedia releases the source code
Having the source code available would not suddenly make Flash a useful technology.
Flash is anti-useful.
It is an excuse for web developers to use eye-candy instead of content (as if they needed one) on their sites. And so continues the gradual and complete dilution of useful content on the internet. The bonus is that it is an effective way of marking a site 'useless' during long and painful web searches.
Future Wine support is a monstrous idea. Releasing a version for Linux makes business sense, but are people seriously considering running Wine just to browse the internet?
I allow for exceptions, but I have seen very few sites which actually use Flash to present useful content in a sensible way. This would, unfortunately, force me to use it. I have seen none recently, because I don't use the plug-in. I flat out refuse.
A tip for my fellow Flash haters: delete mozilla's null plugin. Then it'll stop bugging you about downloading Flash.
(Damn, I guess I won't get to see the latest movie sites. Fortunately I don't care about them. Or the latest movies either.)
Why would you want it?
Because I happen to enjoy silly animations and games.
You say that as if there is something wrong with enjoying 'silly animations and games'. I do. So do many other people.
It may also be inaccessible, but every day people enjoy things that aren't globally accessible, from various forms of media and art to sports and recreation. How do you make animation accessible to those with vision difficulties?
One could write a story instead, but then you have something totally different. Hypertext has been around for decades, and text itself for millennia, and they serve their purpose. Animation serves another.
There will always be people who choose a poor method of presenting their content on the web. Even without Flash, it's still possible to have poorly-navigable sites with too many fonts, and garish colours, et cetera.
The way to solve it is not to discourage the use of Flash, as if it were inherently wrong, but to encourage and show examples of good design and presentation when Flash is not called for.
This may be a niche, but I for one am quite happy that such a niche exists, and is available to Linux users. I'd like to think that one day SVG will be a better alternative and we can all switch to that, but for now there's Flash.
If you don't like it, don't install it. But don't expect others to do the same.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Because vector graphics authoring tools that use motion SVG are, at their beta stage of development, quite poor?
Because HTML/XML can't play movie trailers, whereas Flash's Sorenson codec, native on Linux, can?
Because unlike Java, Flash UI is responsive. unlike DHTML its actually designed for forms, and unlike ActiveX, its cross platform.
Macromedia still don't care about Linux in any meaningful fashion - wake me up when Flash 8 comes out simultaneously on Windows and Linux (Mozilla can do it with a Web browser that's 1,000 times more complex, so why not a browser plug-in?), when Shockwave Player finally appears on Linux and when Macromedia's entire Windows product range is available natively on Linux. Only then can you finally say Macromedia is taking Linux seriously - Oracle switched (albeit from Solaris)...c'mon Macromedia, make the same move...
Clause 3g reads "don't compete with us", clause 3b read "don't even think about it".
Reads: Here's your notice if case we wish to track you or your usage of the software.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
There are clearly 11 badgers before the two mushrooms.
So to clarify:
badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger Mushroom! MUSHROOM!
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
No, this thread is about desktop developers... Uh... Oh...
developers
Developers
deVelpers
deVELOPERS
DEVELOPERS
DEVELOPERS
DEVELOPERS!
DEVELOPERS!!
DEVELOPERS!!!
Crap! He's got me doing it!
Gee, the extra registers might come in handy....
The moral of the story is: "Always remember to mount a scratch monkey."
You want the Shockwave player for Linux? This is where the Slashdot Effect can actually help.
Go to the Macromedia 'wish form' and tell them you want Shockwave Player for Linux! Development over there seems to be demand-driven, so fill out the form. If they get enough requests, they might just do it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
So now that we finally DO get all the fun, what were the first few sites you went to to actually experience our newly acquired proper flash abilities on Linux? First two sites that I hit were Ninjai and The Rasterbator.
Most likely they think they retain some type of advantage by restricting the most efficient version of the player. However, Macromedia's player isn't the only one available. Apple's Quicktime has had the ability to play back Flash since version 4.
A snippet from the press release: "Because the Flash format is vector-based, Flash content is bandwidth efficient and scales automatically to display as designed in any Web browser. The Flash file format (.swf) is an open standard: any software vendor can output Flash files by writing to the specification published on Macromedia's Web site at www.flash.com/open."
(note - if you want the spec, you should really be here instead. But again, when you download it, you agree not to transmit the spec to anyone else, and there's a rule in the license which basically amounts to "the player you design should actually work before you release it.")
in my opinion, the value of Dreamweaver is not necessarily in its WYSIWYG whatever crap, but in its project management and its streamlining of the design process. You can write the same code in a number of different programs, but when you're dealing with anything over than twenty dynamic webpages (with their associated template and include files) it sure is handy to have something like Dreamweaver or GoLive to help you make sense of your mishmash of files... if you're a bit scatterbrained like me, that is.
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
One of my major problems with the flash 6 for linux was how it handled the fade ins and outs that you find in a lot of things on newgrounds. It took 5 to 10 times longer to actually do it compared to the Windows version. Some games also had a problem with the same timing. For a long time, I used crossover office just for the flash plugin but I got frustrated with it crashed constantly and having to reload or cleanup just to download a new flash. Thankfully, the new version actually does a fade in and out properly and one of my favorite music videos in flash, There she is! is almost perfect on my box.
--- My novel, The Mummy's Girl is now for sa
No. Copyright gives them the ability to control reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution of copies, public performance and public display of their work. Period. If I have legally obtained a copy, I can view and experience it however, whenever, with whatever, and at whichever volume and quality I want. They can build technical barriers, but DMCA notwithstanding, those barriers are neither legally nor, in my opinion, morally binding.