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Why Is Adobe Flash On Linux Still Broken?
mwilliamson writes "As I sit reading my morning paper online I still cannot view the embedded videos due to auto-detection of my Flash player not working. One in every three or four YouTube videos crashes the browser. I remember sometime back reading that Adobe has a very small development team (possibly only one) working on the Linux port of Flash. It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system. No matter how stably, smoothly, efficiently, and correctly Linux runs on a machine, the public will continue to view it as second-rate if Flash keeps crashing. This is the worst example of being tied down and bound by a crappy 3rd-party product over which no Linux distribution has any control. GNASH is nice, but it just isn't there 100%. I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."
Adopt Silverlight!
Flash (and Silverlight, et al) are a threat to the Internet generally. I wouldn't run Flash even if they bothered to create a version that runs on my OS (64-bit Linux).
The more of use that don't use Flash, the better.
So there is no version of Flash that is open source then?
The disadvantage of not being able to play Flash is mostly on sites like YouTube. But some other sites are also using Flash for the interesting content.
So the big question is - is it possible to implement a Flash player for Linux that's open source?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
works for me
Are you still on Firefox 2? I had those problems but they went away with the upgrade to Firefox 3 (I'm on Ubuntu).
Can any native browser comply with the W3 SVG validation tests? AM
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. - HGTTG
Flash 9.0.124.0 crashes all the time on my wife's Windows XP system running Firefox as well. Most of the time it exhibits as not being able to play sound. So it definitely isn't limited to Linux. Flash is just crap.
I used to have this happen to be on Ubuntu 8.04. I fixed it by downloading the official version of Flash from the Adobe website and replacing all of the versions of the .so on my computer. Wouldn't you know it, it worked again. I think the problem is that the version in Ubuntu 8.04 was hacked up to support PulseAudio. When I removed PulseAudio, suddenly audio didn't work anymore (in addition to, you know, the crashing all the time), but when I replaced the .so, it did again. So I recommend going to the Adobe website and getting the official version, because it does work.
I've noticed, at least since I switched from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, that when Adobe Flash Player 9 ( or 10 ) is installed the browser exhibits sporadic lockups and crashes when navigating the Web -- not just when viewing Flash video or a site that makes heavy use of Flash, although that does seem to increase the odds of the browser eating itself.
After the release of Firefox 3.0 I opted to install Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta. The performance was much better as was the video quality and I didn't experience as many crashes. This all changed when Adobe updated the Beta and the details can be found in the bug report that I filed here. To summarize, after the update, Flash Player 10 would cause the browser to segfault and lockup so frequently, sometimes even upon startup, that the browser became unusable -- I had to downgrade to Flash Player 9. Currently there is someone from Adobe assigned to work on the "problem" whatever it is, but I haven't heard anything in weeks.
jdb2
I experienced frequent Firefox crashes due to Flash in my Ubuntu box, which went being upgraded from 6.06 to 7.04 to 7.10 to 8.04. But then my hard disk crashed and I had to reinstall Ubuntu 8.04 from scratch. It's been now three months of this fresh installation, and in this period Flash has never, ever, crashed my Firefox. It's been rock solid.
My wild guess then would be that your setup is half-broken much like mine was. Try that old Windows trick of wiping your hard disk and reinstalling your Linux distribution, whatever it is. It might be the solution.
Now, this doesn't mean Flash in Linux isn't still full of bugs. It not respecting transparencies and correct depth levels in pages is a major annoyance. But at least crashing isn't part of the list anymore, at least for me.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Flash is a great channel to provide commercial products (video, ads, DRM'ed shit).
It's no threat at all when Flash isn't abused as website critical table of contents.
To comment on the OP: have you already tried the version 10 release candidate? It's supposed to support new audio API's and hardware acceleration.
They just don't care because there are no real competitors to Flash. For most mainstream sites today, Flash is mandatory. (And no amount of boycott will change that.)
I think the best way to fix this is by subversion and infiltration. Boycotts don't work. They haven't worked with Vista and won't work with Flash.
The Linux community needs to stop thinking it can "boycott" things like protocols, and file formats and instead, work to make alternate applications that can work with those file formats and protocols to eat the other guy's lunch.
Every time I install Ubuntu, I just add FlashBlock and I am set. Life is too short to waste my time to Flash enormous appetite for CPU power. For casual user it actually works - just avoid 10 tabs and 5 windows. Yes, I am waiting for Swfdec and Gnash to knock Adobe out of it's monopoly for Flash player. I would like to both teams come together and try to finish stuff, but it is up to them.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I suggest the read of penguin.swf blogosplat which is Adobe's blog for posting new version of flash for linux (such as the recent Flash 10 beta or the new alpha)
You'll have Pulseaudio tell you different, but if you use a pure Alsa for your sound, you'll find Flash--and everything else that uses sound--runs MUCH better.
I have no idea why Pulseaudio has been thrust into various distributions, it's cumbersome at best, outright broken at worst. There's nothing Pulseaudio brings to the table that's needed. Application volume sliders? Anything that outputs volume already has a volume slider, why do I need another one? Sound over the network? Is this REALLY a feature people want at the expense of a huge majority of programs not working? And what's wrong with ESD for this?
So do yourself a favor, and remove all the Pulseaudio stuff from your distro.
far from the now mature process of download/click/wait/enjoy, the process involved getting just the right software version, installing it manually in the correct location, maybe hacking around with .INI files and then crossing your fingers that the mean-time-between-crashes was longer than the time it took to print your document.
So it is with installing flash on FF3/U_x64. The process basically sucks and as said, provides a sufficiently bad user experience to turn normal people off Linux for years.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."
This is an irksome statement. I doubt Adobe has an interest in making Linux look bad. Isn't there a saying, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
Probably what would work better here is, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by business sense." Linux is 4%ish of the desktop market so it would make sense that 4% (or less, but certainly not more) of Adobe flash development go to linux porting. 4% of their development just isn't going to make Flash as good as it is on other platforms, and I doubt they are receiving a lot of money from linux distros to change this.
Yeah it sucks if you use linux but no need to point a finger at Adobe. Its simple dollars and cents (or sense).
Flash doesn't work completely reliably on any platform I have tried. I find that Adobe Flash on 32bit Linux works about as well as the OS X version (meaning: it's usable but it does have occasional problems).
The main problem people are having is that there is no 64bit Linux version of Flash, so all you can do is run it in some emulated environment.
Adobe cares about the folks buying expensive site and server licenses. Those guys don't really care about you because there aren't enough of ya to have much impact on their website's success, so why should adobe invest in your platform, besides the bare minimum quality implementation as a hedge in case desktop linux becomes more important some day. There's no economic incentive.
What does it say if Adobe only has 1 employee (if that) working on the linux Flash port and he's doing a better job than GNASH and open source development?
If you really feel so strongly about Flash's importance, maybe you should help turn GNASH into a viable solution.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I've got Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my work machine, still running FF 2 (haven't gotten around to upgrading to 3 yet), and the Flash plugin works fine. I think it causes the browser to crash maybe once every few months, and then it's always 1) when I've had the browser open a long time without restarting, and 2) some complicated, overstuffed SWF gets opened and it just tips things over the edge.
Aside from that (and the wmode thing), I don't really have any trouble with Flash. And lest you think I don't use it enough, I work for a website that has Flash embedded on nearly every page, sometimes multiple times, and we host hundreds of Flash games. So it's not like I'm not loading a lot of Flash.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Ymmv, etc., etc..
I'm using the newest version of Flash on Ubuntu 8.04.1 (32-bit, because I don't actually need 64-bit at this time) with no major problems whatsoever. The only minor problem I have is that if I watch too many videos in a row, Firefox's RAM allotment chokes and crashes the browser.
... What distro/bit-type/browser are you using?
I'm curious, kdawson
Hopefully, competition from Microsoft will force Adobe to get its act together. (That will be the last nice thing I say about Microsoft this year.)
Prevent Windows piracy. Use Linux instead.
I wish they would write a version for Linux (good luck though!)
I have the same problem with Flash on Windows. What does that mean to the public?
Linux users dont buy software. There is no revenue stream there. Plus, the user base is too small. Businesses are not charity, they aren't going to cater to a group that is more likely to pirate their goods than buy them. Sure, flash is free, but flash is used for distributing media and generating ad revenue. However, will linux users patronize advertisers? Its not likel bases on their other non-purchasing behavior.
There's various bug reports about this with regards to Pulseaudio and Flash--as well as numerous othat applications--in all major distributions that have packaged Pulseaudio by default. I'm not going to link all the bug reports in a slashdot comment, but you can search for them yourself.
The story and summary seems to be calling out Adobe on this issue, when it's not really their fault. If PA didn't have as many compatibility issues with alsa applications as it has, Flash would work fine.
It's unfair to call out Adobe on this issue. It expects a working alsa implementation, and when it has to use Pluseaudio's version of the virtual device, it crashes. Adobe doesn't have any control over the faultily implementation. So if there's a story that's about Flash crashing fine, but let's put the blame where it belongs here.
..frankly Adobe (and other major software vendors) is one of the main barriers to adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.
I'm on Mac OS Leopard and the only thing it'd take to make me move to Linux is to be able to get the Adobe, Microsoft and other suites of professional applications on Linux. That's na' ga' happen. Wouldn't be prudent for Adobe, Microsoft, et al.
And Gdammit (beta), don't tell me that GIMP is just as good as Photoshop. Just don't. It's not, just not, just so very NOT. And there are a million other reasons that the other Adobe tools rock so thoroughly more than the best creative tools you can find on Linux.
So Flash - a product from a giant software vendor that you need serious power-tools to create well (yes, I'm quite aware that the SWF spec is open) - is broken on Linux, AND you can't get the power-tools to create it. I'll shed the tiny tears for Flash (which sucks, in most cases), and the big tears for Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Fireworks (new version is gonna rock), Lightwave 3D, MS Excel, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and a hundred other tools that are must-haves within their disciplines.
I dont have any problem with flash, its a little slow initializing in Konqueror, but that must be due to the nsplugin loading. Also works fine in Iceweasel 3. I dont experience crashing, I didnt even know that was a problem. However, the biggest complaint I here from the Linux users I talk to is performance, full screen isnt so good. OpenGL acceleration would be nice. I dont like flash either, but it works.
Of course it's possible to implement Flash with free software, but that won't solve the problem. Free software is a powerful enough development method to overcome CSS, the Windows API, SMB, and DX. What task do you think is out of reach? The problem then is one of a legal framework that makes it impossible to distribute free software that works with broken media like DVDs and websites that use Flash. There are technical solutions but legal solutions are better. Software patents and the DMCA must go.
There are several technical solutions to broken media. One is for individuals to ignore bad laws and just get DeCSS. A better one is to code around YouTube like Clive does. You can also simply avoid non free media, after all the Internet Archive, Wikipedia and Creative Commons have multiple lifetimes worth of excellent entertainment and education. Most of these send a clear message that Flash, Silverlight and other non free media is broken. Competing technology and it's users are going to win.
Legal solutions are better. We would not have problems with broken media if people were allowed to share their solutions. Laws that prohibit people from sharing free software are always wrong and should never have passed. Modern copyright law is at odds with its purpose and must be reformed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
s/ On Linux//;
Flash on Linux is terrible.
Flash on the Mac is an abomination.
Flash on Windows is fairly crappy, but at least when it works it's not the massive CPU hog it is on other platforms. When it works.
There are some very smart guys at Adobe, but I've yet to be convinced that they're actually allowed to do their job across most of the product range.
i think the iphone's lack of flash support is going to force more and more web developers to offer alternatives to flash or to drop flash altogether.
In terms of Flash and YouTube there really are issues yet no one seems to care. Many, many people have issues with YouTube videos freezing after 2 seconds of initial play. There are tons of suggestions as to how to fix this but none seem to work 100% or all the time. I thought the de-select JAVA option for Firefox solved the video issue but it is not a 100% fix either. Given the popularity one would think YouTube, Adobe and FF people could come to a fix. Also, why isn't Adobe supporting Linux now that Microsoft is pushing their Silverlight platform.
I may be the only one here who finds this news. Although this is of course at least partially a symptom of my not caring about he iphone in general.
However, as my wife wants the iphone, I have to ask how this problem works. I thought most systems used flash for youtube - which leads me to the question of how does the iphone use youtube if it doesn't use flash?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
He even said it himself in his article: "It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system." Adobe's two biggest cash cows are Windows and Mac users. Why should anyone that earns such a lot of money and has close ties to the aforementioned companies be interested in supporting the Open Source community. As we all now, that's communist bullshit and kills the software industry. Right? Right? It's another typical example of how so called standards are used to limit the degree of freedom in a market and why big companies are so particularly bad for human evolution (I consider technological innovation and knowledge culture evolutionary traits).
Have some tcpdump or ngrep logs to show such behavior? Or maybe your tinfoil hat is too tight.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Probably the very low user penetration. It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system. I've been hearing that argument for years. I remember back in 1999 hearing how Linux would be ready for the desktop in 2001. Years have passed since then and it still isn't. The underlining problem is that Linux and its components create a system written by developers for developers, and it always will be. But the thing is, there's nothing wrong with that. The fun of linux is the fun of being able to tweak everything, and lets face it simple systems like Mac and Windows just aren't as fun in that way.
One in every three or four YouTube videos crashes the browser.
Of course the ideal solution would be for Adobe to fix Flash, but in the meantime you can use nspluginwrapper to prevent Firefox from crashing whenever Flash goes down. nspluginwrapper runs Flash in a separate child process from the web browser, and uses IPC to display the plugin's contents in your browser; it was originally created to allow people to use 32-bit plugins in 64-bit browsers, but this mechanism is also great for isolating the web browser from plugin crashes.
Another solution is to use Opera, which on Linux runs its plugins in an nspluginwrapper-like child process by default.
Are you so inept at fixing a pc that you think wiping the entire OS is some sort of monumental task? Is troubleshooting for 3 hours better than wiping your OS clean in 30 minutes? (you have your home directory on a separate partition, right?)
Thank you, finally someone with some sense. It's really really easy to fuck up a Linux installation if you are a twiddler, like say, add the wrong repository to your update manager and then have some beta packages installed whose version numbers are hard-coded into each other and disappear after a few hours. What fun.
Wiping windows is a pain but a necessity -everybody seems to have accepted that.
Wiping Linux is a breeze but you have to know how to properly do it to save time -fewer people seem to have gotten that far.
Separate Home partition ftw!
Custom protocols and standards wreck the web, which originally got large in part because of its inherent interoperability.
It's why we bothered to put things in HTML in the first place, instead of linking Gopher trees to LaTex and .doc files.
I have never liked Flash for this reason. It's a hog on Opera, and unstable as well on Firefox. It encourages the worst kind of contentless web site creation. Finally, it's a giant sieve of security holes and vulnerabilities.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
I had pretty bad case of crashing with SB Audigy myself and I'm pretty sure that's what caused crashes because physical removal of Audigy and enabling onboard Intel HDA fixed all my problems. That crap (Audigy SE) doesn't even properly work under Vista anyway.
Firefox 3 also contributes a lot in terms of Flash stability, there was a long standing bug where browser would crash when closing a tab with Flash content occasionaly - it doesn't happen in FF3 anymore. Epiphany still crashes though even though it's using same engine.
Flash is even broken on Windows and OSX
Maybe not as broken as you find it on Linux, but when it comes to sucking performance for no reason or doing really stupid things like cropping video when flipping to full screen video it has some rather hugh problems. (Multi-Monitors is something Adobe thinks people don't use for watching Flash Video apparently, cause it looks very untested.)
Sadly, Flash with Firefox is 10x worse than Flash with IE. After thinking I was going insane on a few new personal installs, I pulled techs to examine the Flash differences. Same sites, same Flash content, and inside Firefox it would bring the CPU to 100% and with IE not even scratch the CPU.
These are also not lemur porn quality sites, these are mainstream sites that have Flash based Ads or even MSNBC which has not moved to Silverlight.
In contrast, the new Silverlight is pretty, efficient and shiny in comparison on both Firefox and IE and even OS X. The NBC Olympic HD streaming it has been handling works better than even my Silverlight developer 'fans' expected, making Flash look problematic and more like an old dog.
Thoroughly testing one platform is hard enough. Testing against each and every current version of every popular distro is a lot of regression tests.
The situation with Linux isn't horrible for open source software--the load of testing all those system permutations is theoretically distributed across the teams of all those distros.
For commercial software (and open source if we were completely honest), testing on loads of platforms is just a lot of time and energy that companies like Adobe don't really have to dedicate to such a small percentage of their potential customer base.
. Penguins Surely Ca
The original design of NetPhotoClasses.org (http://www.netphotoclasses.org/classes) used some Flash for displaying instructional presentations but after it didn't work as expected on either a new build of Firefox or IE 7 (worked on IE6, Microsoft told me it was my site... go figure) all Flash was removed and everything now comes out of php. The interesting thing with the Firefox problem was it failed dismally on both the Linux and Windows versions.
You should be able to tweak everything and have Flash.
Linux should also be the dominant OS if people were intelligent but they're not.
Sadly computers are like cars. There is a small group that loves being able to have access to everything but most people rather worry about something boring and expect their computer to do their thinking for them. But that is flawed and will never work until computers are smarter than people and run their household for them.
Works fine for me. Get a better distribution.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The latest beta's have terrible crashing problems, but the primary crashes are currently being addressed on the bug tracker. wmode issues are also being resolved. This should put flash on linux in the same ballpark as flash on OS-X.
Of course we're pissed about it, but really, I think Adobe is already stepping up to the plate on this one.
Is that a good sports metaphor? I dunno. I don't do sports.
If you wish to try a recent beta without messing with your system, run the installer on the adobe site as a non-privileged user. It will install to your home directory, and can be removed by deleting a single file.
i.e, remove libflashsupport, use the latest flash 10 beta and create a /etc/asound.conf as described in bug 198453
I've not had any browser crashes since doing this, so cross fingers. This is probably a very common problem..
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5587712&postcount=472. This guy has for a long time been working on getting flash working perfectly in ubuntu 8.04 and following the linked guide makes it work perfectly for me.
seriously who hasnt given old flash a throw or two?
remember when it was called futuresplash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#History
back in the day we didnt have no old school
Poor Flash is the one major barrier? Pah - there are a number of more pressing issues, like poor wireless support...
Hardware problems are annoying, but they are fundamentally different from the problem of "critical" software being broken or unavailable. A computer manufacturer that wants to ship computers with Linux pre-loaded, instead of Windows, can pick Linux-friendly hardware to work around the hardware problems. There is no work-around for Flash being crap.
I also hate how some pages do not detect that you have it at all. Instead of offering a "Click here to try the SWF file ANYWAY", they link you to adobe.
thedailyshow.com recently changed so that i can no longer see their videos =(
Real slashdotters use text browsers like Lynx. Graphical browsers are for sissies.
Adobe Flash has been pretty rock solid for me for the past two years or so, and it worked acceptably for the year before that (there were some sound issues back then). All three years I've been using it in a 64-bit Firefox on Gentoo. Currently it's Flash player 9.0.124.0 on Firefox 3.0.1. I watch YouTube videos almost every day as well as frequently using other flash video sites. I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed, whether I was watching a flash video or not.
I therefore call bullshit. You should try reinstalling Flash, Firefox, or your whole distro -- or perhaps switch to another distro. Flash on Linux works perfectly over here.
I'm running Ubuntu that the teenager in the house uses all the time and watches Youtube videos all day. I just asked her if it crashes and she said she never has any problems except for sometimes it's slow.
Can I bum a sig?
Once Firefox 3.1 comes out and includes support for playback of Theora videos and Ogg audio... I hope there will be in influx of new content published (using the more simple tags) using Theora and Ogg. Hopefully that will cause some momentum and give Flash some competition. I realize that Flash is used for a lot more than just video and audio but it is the dominant thing Linux users care to use Flash for. Of course that isn't going to cause YouTube to switch everything over to Theora / Ogg but you have to start somewhere.
Scott Dowdle
www.MontanaLinux.Org
I have Flashblock installed with FF on my XP machine and after several years can count the number of "exceptional sites" - where Flash is allowed to load - on one hand. If a site requires Flash to present their content, find another site.
Personally, I care way more about fonts than Flash. On my Fedora 8 install if I run "rpm -qa | grep -i font" I see a lot of packages installed. Too many, considering I still think the fonts I see on my OOB Fedora 8 installation look like crap. And yes, I have done a fair amount of tweaking. They still look like shit. Especially on Firefox.
one in three or four would be really high in my experience.
Of course, of course, any proprietary monopoly would have issues, but the truth is that I'm happier with Flash as the ubiquitous video presenter than I was back in the day of .wmv everywhere.
Baby steps.
Ok. Adobe support for Linux, despite their claims otherwise, is flaky and always late. No news here. They failed to completly convince opinion leaders (read: Linux users) in the field of web developement that they are serious, and my comitment to open source flash projects has rather dimished than grown since MX 2004 Pro / Flash 7. Right now I'm earning 60k/year as a Flash9/ActionScript 3 developer and still I don't trust them farther than I can throw them. Adobemedia has been doing to much bullshitting about their commitment to the Linux camp, and consitently delivered late ever since I went all-out Flash with a larger RIA project when Flash 7 for Linux finally came out.
However, what you are describing most certainly is a Linux problem. Aside from playing video, Flash on youtube doesn't do much, and I've watched a lot of youtube videos with Linux and have had no problems at all doing it. And if you run into a site that uses lots of Flash and doesn't render correctly, chances are you've met with a bunch of idiots who are to freakin' dumb to build a truly x-plattform RIA in Flash. Despite them possibly claiming to the the RIA Kings of the Interweb. Like these people for instance. (Linux users with working Flash, please let me know in a reply if any of you can reach the Flashsite ... I'd like to know if they've caught on yet ...)
Developing in Flash requires lots of skill and often some old-school hacks for high performance applications such as this and a solid knowledge of the target client plattforms. For example, a particle system I'm working on/with buckles by 25% on WinXP when run under Firefox+Flash then if run under IE+Flash. And while it's nearly a no-brainer to watch out for those two or three showstoppers that can prevent a Flash App from running correctly on x86 Linux (correct Font embedding for instance), I have to admit that good Flash/AS developers are rare. You have to be firm in graphics, typography *and* programming and then you have to be open-minded enough (read: not have your head up your arse) to try out a semi-proprietary plattform like Flash. Rare ingredients indeed.
Bottom Lines:
1) You have a Linux problem, not a Flash problem.
2) Most Flashers are mediocre at best. Guess where all the Flash crap comes from? The one or other RIA not rendering in FF/Linux is for the same reason.
3) Yes, Adobe's commitment to Linux *still* hasn't reached the level it needs to convince opinion leaders.
4) Where the *f*ck* is an open source RIA plattform allready? Webrunner/Prism will take another decade or so, guessing from the speed in general, and animated SVG doesn't even exist. JavaFX has come further than any other attempt from Sun - which has me very suprised - but I wouldn't be suprised if they'd stop dead in their tracks once again. Until the sky falls and the rivers run red with blood and Sun finally gets it's RIA going, Flash will be exactly what opinion leaders in the field still reluctantly have to account to it: The most prevailent RIA-enabled zero-fuss deployment plattform on the planet. Apparently Adobe can still dick around for another 10 years, since nobody is really challenging them yet.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Depends, is one trying to be productive or is one a hobbyist? I find that most of the time when I spend the time to troubleshoot the problem, I end up with some ideas as to how to avoid the problem the next time around, or how to fix it in minimal time when it does occur.
But in terms of productivity, unless it's a recurring problem, it probably is more productive to just reinstall the OS in those cases.
Well, that's assuming that one doesn't compile everything from scratch and lack backups of the packages from which to quickly reinstall them.
Don't you think it's more likely that the iphone will be forced to adopt flash, rather than an entirely new flash player being develop from scratch just to cater to a single mobile unit .. ?
You may like your iphone but it's not the end-all, be-all of mobile web delivery and eventually will be outdated just like everything else.
All it's going to take is a few high profile cell phones to offer flash compatibility and apple's hand will be forced. I'm convinced the only reason this hasn't happened yet is that once all the flash games are available online for free via cell phones nobody is going to be strong armed into paying $5 for tetris anymore ..etc
Regardless, it's inevitable that cell phones will start offering the flash player if you look at the trends. They are becoming more and more synonymous with traditional browsers and desktop functionality. And once that box is opened then all of the other companies will be forced to follow suite.
ease up on the guy, he's probably had way to many years on Windows. Heck, I hear this from regular Linux users myself and often it is rebooting the OS to "fix" a networking problem.
People just don't know how the systems work these days and magic is the only thing they know.
I have run across flash showing up in a few locations so this is probably what happened to this guy and unfortunately, he only knew a re-installation fixed his problems. Sad but a good example of how uninformed computer users are today.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
If they actually made Flash work properly on Linux what would be next? They might have to [gasp] make Photoshop work there.
Btw, if Flash works fine on OS/X, just how hard can Linux really be?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I haven't read all the code in my system. But lots of people certainly have read lots of portions of it, so I can expect that somebody trying to put malicious code there would have to think twice before trying that. Sooner or later somebody will see that, so it is less likely it will be put there intentionally. And if it is there indeed, then there is big chance somebody will fix it. None of this can be asserted about proprietary software.
Oh yes, hardware problems are just annoying. Let's just forget for a minute that many people buy one computer, and often do not have much extra disposable income to upgrade or arbitrarily change hardware to run Linux. And then, if they even hear about Linux, it ends up not working for them out of the box (and just give up there), and less than 1% of users will actually take the time to get it working, and THEN they find that their favourite software doesn't have good clones. No, actually, hardware incompatibilities and bad drivers are considerably more important. If you can't get your display running, who cares if the Gimp is crap or not?
It's a major barrier for those that want to do "casual" things like web browsing, which is to say pretty much everyone on the desktop. I don't have a problem with wireless, drivers, multimedia support (ok so kaffeine/mplayer/vlc isn't pretty but something works), ACPI, don't need no vendor preload or any of those things. I'm sure it sucks for those that do, but most of the things you speak can be avoided by buying the right computer. Recommendations, competition and so on will take care of that. Flash is just one of those things that don't work for anybody, period. No workaround, not even the darkest of command line magic will make it run properly. Luckily I use opera where it only kills the "operapluginwrapper" but it's still very crappy. Kill & reload has become rather a standard practise.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Because there's no money to be made in porting it to Linux, that's why.
Adobe really irritates me with some of the strange seeming choices they make. Flash works fine on Solaris 10, both x68 & sparc, but Adobe hasn't updated Acrobat Reader for Solaris x86 since Acrobat 5, but the sparc version is up to date.
This signature is a waste of 42 characters
Facebook and Youtube are good fun but I don't see them as being important enough to make older PCs turn to machines that aren't even "web-ready".
LINUX is my only desktop and laptop OS running the GNOME desktop. I have *ZERO* problems with flash. Everything just works. I've never had a problem playing a YouTube video, my browser has never crashed on YouTube. Our corporate Intranet uses flash in many cases and always works.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Flash doesn't crash so often with a good audio driver. The main problem is the new PulseAudio and no update from adobe. With alsa it works like a charm.
Since firefox 3 I never had crashes due to flash movies like i had with firefox 1.5 or 2. Maybe you should try to upgrade ? Also flashblock helps at managing resources by starting the flash content only when you want to, this way avoiding resource consumption by various banners or ads. As about gnash, that's just a poor joke.
I see a number of arguements about how flash helps delivery websites with *rich* *dynamic* content. Why? I am not a proponent of keeping the web at v1.0 but I absolutely hate sites that are drenched in so much flash that you can't see anything but moving, dynamtic, useless junk. Other technologies allow much more usefull dynamic contect(this *AMP) where content can be dynamically loaded from a database and menus can be dynamic and flowing and work on almost every web browser without issue.
Consider that youtube is flash done right. flash is just a powerful COMPONENT of a webpage and not a webpage building platform. It has become a complete platform where the html is just used to load a bunch of flash up but those sites are essentially content free! and are just trying to be flashy!
that being said, if flash was not being pushed to be an entire platform for web contenct delivery, then it would not be so difficult to get flash working on all platforms. The constant evolution of flash is the problem. Flash is not getting better at doing anything that it is really good for, just getting more of the useless stuff. Evolution for the sake of evolution causes extinction!
"It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system."
It has occurred to me that for the past decade, every Linux user has thought his most recent personal itch was the one major entry barrier to Linux desktop domination, and they have all been completely wrong.
The major entry barrier to Linux desktop domination is that even if you're a hardcore Mac or Linux or BSD guy, Windows simply doesn't suck that much. In general, any reasonably competent computer user can sit down at a Windows machine and get his work done. He may have to go out foraging for the right tools, but they're out there, and they're readily accessible.
Meanwhile, there is a vast community of computer users who are NOT reasonably competent, and while they may not be particularly good at getting their work done on Windows, they are EVEN WORSE at getting it done on anything else.
When retarded people can use Linux, you might have a shot at desktop domination. Until then, don't bother.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
... will remain an utter failure. Developers decide that Flash and the like are the problem and decide that the user should go without or spend hours of trial and error to get it. Guess what, flash works great for me in Konqueror and fails miserably in FF. This has made me realize that Flash support is not the blame of Adobe, but because of unpredictable behaviour of linux on a given configuration.
Flash may or may not be evil closed source, it's as basic to the normal use of a computer as a sound- and video-driver (2nd failure on linux) or ubiquitous wireless detection (3rd failure on linux).
After years of Linux the only advance I see is continuous devotion to appearance instead of content and the blatant copying of evil closed-software packages.
My prediction: in 5 years there will be a large number of open-source flash-forks. None of them will work 100%. It'll be supported after the next generation of multimedia tools will flood your computer.
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
I can't do anything with Gnash or swfdec so i have to put up with Flash 9. I tried Flash 7 but a lot of sites won't work with it.
Also, i can get a way better playback quality by playing the Flash file from /tmp with mplayer (no video or audio skipping).
And Flash is also _so_ annoying. It takes longer for pages to load, scrolling gets slower, distracting videos, obnoxious audio. . .
Flash is garbage. Flashblock is gold.
The original poster of this article is experiencing bugs with his or her distribution, *not* merely with Flash. There are several issues at work here.
a) Flash 10 RC is the first version to support "windowless mode" flash content that several sites use. Unfortunately, there is a bug in Firefox that causes "windowless mode" content to crash. It is not a bug caused by Adobe Flash; un fact, the newest version of swfdec (which also added support for "windowless mode" content) also causes Firefox to crash. This fix is due for release in Firefox 3.0.2 and a workaround is available for older releases already. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/239182
b) Ubuntu Hardy was the first release to integrate PulseAudio, but its default configuration can cause a lot of trouble for users. PulseAudio provides ALSA plugins that enable plain ALSA applications to work correctly with PulseAudio; these plugins are supposed to be enabled by default. Some (buggy) applications do not work correctly using these plugins, including Flash 9 and Audacity. Hardy was released without these plugin enabled, causing many audio mixing problems for users. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/198453
c) It appears the original poster is using the libflashsupport library, which is a workaround to enable PulseAudio support in Flash without the need for the ALSA plugins mentioned in point (b) to be enabled. There is a bug in Flash when using the libflashsupport API; closing and opening new flash streams will result in a crash (such as navigating from one Youtube page to another). See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/192888
d) Flash 10 has fixed its ALSA implementation, allowing it to work correctly with the PulseAudio ALSA plugins as mentioned in point (b) - this means that the (buggy) libflashsupport library is now redundant.
Note that all the above bugs contain links to the upstream issues when applicable. For those too lazy to follow the individual bugs, I have posted a guide to configure PulseAudio (and Flash 10) correctly for Ubuntu users, complete with testing packages. See: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578
The reason is, that even in 2008, most "Linux" people (or BSD, Solaris, Mac) dual boot into Windows just to they can use the few important (to them) things that don't quite work.
So there is no real imperative for things to change. Progress has been slow, and will continue to be so.
Stick Men
I installed 8.04 the other day on a Dell Dimension 1100 (not mine!) about a week ago and I've been watching Flash vids with default FF and Flash utils on both Youtube and Google Vids (longer bigger cuts) with no problem.
Wonder why such inconsistent results between all us users?
-Matt
like poor wireless support (on the driver level),
With the exception of broadcom wireless chipsets almost always work. It's not our fault you buy a toaster and try and run it with OSX. Research before you buy. You'd do the same for windows and osx so why not linux? Is it because we're giving this away that it needs to be the best?
(It has the best support for wireless out of any OS, by far, if you haven't realised.)
poor opensource drivers and closed drivers being difficult to configure manually,
Examples? The only things I can think of are nVidia and ATI's closed drivers. For catalyst when you get a driver that works stick with it until the next good one, and the free ATI drivers work just fine for 2D and basic 3D (I'm pretty sure they can do compiz now).
poor multimedia support on the API level (using SDL helps a bit though),
Have you looked at KDE4's archetectures? They're pretty damn good for "multimedia". Unless you meant games? Still, it's not the kernel's job to play your videos. Require mplayer/gstreamer/xine/whatever and use it.
iffy ACPI support on a number of systems,
Because vendors like Foxconn locking us out and killing any OS other than windows is our problem?
Not our fault, sadly, that ACPI is a broken "standard".
negligible vendor preloads,
Dell, Acer, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and HP offer linux preloads. Those are the biggest names in the industry (MSI being the smallest one). You can hardly call that negligible. It's more than before.
Heck, I saw a futureshop advertisement for the Acer netbook, it had advertised it came with Linpus Linux! That's the first time I've ever seen "linux" on a bestbuy-sponsored ad!
and probably a number of other things.
Yeah but help us find them and find out what the problem actually is. Sitting around and saying linux sucks like the "linux hater" isn't going to help anyone.
Flash is broken for FreeBSD. Been broken for years. Why whine about Flash being broken? Stop showing support - don't use sites that have opted to use technology that lacks support for open source.
That might be easy for you to say, but just about everyone between 10-20 uses YouTube.
*blah blah stops adoption of Linux blah blah* I've heard that for years. 1st it was the reliability. Then it was office suites. Then .... Yet every time whatever has 'stopped' adoption - there is not the 'expected uptick'. Stop worrying about 'what stops adoption' - because if Microsoft really feels threatened - the resulting actions (like a free Microsoft OS) will stop the fragmented GNU/Linux OS in its tracks.
How isn't it the 'expected uptick'? When Linux got reliable it became dominant on servers, when OOo started getting better and Office/Windows kept on getting worse you can now buy systems from almost any vendor with Linux pre-installed! Just because they currently hide the systems with Linux in a dark corner of the site doesn't mean that they don't exist. And again, with no Flash support you can kiss having the 10-20 year old crowd using Linux goodbye.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This is another myth Linux advocates delude themselves with. Most people around my office (scientists, students, IT support, admin folks) NEVER think much about Linux, let along care/know whether Flash works on Linux. Saying Flash now works on Linux is just news to the 1% desktop market and will not make a dent on Linux desktop adoption. Versus the server side market - at least 50% running non-IIS - that is where Adobe pours its resource to make sure its Flex/ColdFusion server work. And what percentage of Linux developers are going to give up Java/PHP/RoR or contemplate buying Adobe Studio (if it ever come out for Linux) and start coding Action Script/CFML/Flex to help Adobe win the platform war? Call it what you will. It's just simple Adobe management decision. Lots of Windows/Mac users actually hates Flash, and it wouldn't made any difference to them (me included) whether Flash works when they choose a desktop. I wonder if the number of Flash haters is actually is greater than all the desktop Linux supporters? Games, however, is another matter, and that is an issue where Linux developers can actually make a difference and not rely on a 3rd party.
It's working on my setup: Ubuntu Hardy Heron, Firefox 3.0, Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124.
YouTube works great and I don't get any crashes.
The Standalone Flash Player works flawlessly on Wine, yet the Flash Player plugin for Linux Firefox just really really sucks. That means somewhere in the linux porting chain, someone is doing a really bad job at programming.
If you think Flash is the ONE THING preventing Linux from being accepted publicly, you're too much of a fanboy to realize how horribly wrong you are.
I think you are missing the point. My comment relates back to the "...Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system..." statement in the original summary.
To be a "viable desktop operating system" it needs to be able to provide functionality that average desktop users demand on some hardware, not on all hardware. If it can't provide required functionality on any hardware at all, it's game over -- manufacturers are going to be very reluctant to ship computers with Linux pre-installed instead of Windows, since buyers will find the computer to be inadequate.
Being able to run on all hardware is nice, and may speed adoption and grow the potential userbase, but it isn't required for viability. Apple's OSX doesn't run on all hardware (as far as I know), and I don't hear anyone claiming it isn't a viable desktop OS because of that.
ease up on the guy, he's probably had way to many years on Windows.
That's also the case, but I'm actually also a hobbyist and know my way around Linux pretty well. In fact, many time I'm in a hurry and don't even bother loading X: I do whatever I need in console mode and am done with it.
It just so happens that nowadays I work full time and go to night college, consequently having only a few hours per weekend to play around in my home box, a much different scenario than when I started figuring out Debian, back in 1997. Very pragmatic consequence: I prefer using those few hours doing useful or fun stuff rather than fixing obscure annoyances. Thus, if I can solve something in one hour by wiping sda1 and reinstalling the OS, my actual data and custom compiled software being well secured in sda3, sda4, a shelf of DVD-Rs and Amazon S3, that's exactly what I'll do.
Simply put, sometimes doing things "the right way" just isn't worth the effort.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I am not aware of a time in the past where an earlier version of flash was more successful on Linux than the current version (which itself is unpredictable at best and terrible at worst). I think the only thing that has changed is that, much to our disdain, flash has become even more widespread on the web.
We've had this lousy product now for over 10 years, and it still is lousy. Unfortunately it has become an even more ubiquitous lousy product.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I am not a fan of Flash, however I have not seen any problems with Flash on Linux since they ended the enormous version lag that broken some sites when Windows hd flash 8 and Linux port stopped development at 7. Flash on Linux is a massive resource eater, has idiotic installation procedure, often has to be updated because of security bugs, however it has exactly the same problems on Windows. It is more crappy and unfixable than most Linux software, however this says more about the level of quality that is considered acceptable on Windows rather than about any deficiencies specific to a Linux port.
As for Youtube, why would a Linux user want to use their flash-based player? Install latest version of clive, mplayer and xclip, and run this script after selecting or copying Youtube URL:
#!/bin/sh
cd "$HOME"
cd Desktop 2>/dev/null
xterm -bg "#ffffff" -fg "#000000" -cr "#800000" -ah -fa "DejaVu Sans Mono" -fs 14 -g 80x6 -T "Video Download" \
-e sh -c \
'xclip -o | clive "--player=mplayer -fs %i" --play=src --mask=custom'
(assign it to some panel launcher or menu in your desktop environent).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
While some people use voice recognition software strictly for dictation, others use it to control their computers, specifically disabled people.
My brother is disabled and he says he has grown to hate flash. It oftens slows his computer down, causes crashes, and isn't accessible outside of manually navigating to its buttons unlike standard HTML which he can just say the name of the link to access.
I also do some web page design here and there and I always dissuade people from using flash as a solution. Sure, you can provide an awesome interface, but at the cost of processing power, bandwidth and broken accessibility, it hardly seems worth it. The goal of a page is to access information with everything else coming after in order of importance IMO.
Vote for this issue: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-114 Not only is it slow as death on a bunch of chipsets, but it crashes constantly. Very annoying.
Seems like every time I see Safari crash, the backtrace of the crashed thread is in FlashEnforceLocalSecurity().
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I know its ancecdotal but, the orgininal Ask Slash dotters statement seems to be as well, flash works just fine on all the linux boxes I browse the web with.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
are better off given that many, many ads are now created in Flash and of course not having the plug-in means you don't have to see the annoying video ads. Of course, with the FF plug-in you can selectively turn Flash off on a site-by-site basis. I personally don't like Flash so I don't miss it.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Flash plugin from adobe works fine for me on firefof on ubuntu. Shockwave doesnt.
You get it from adobe! the package you install is just a script that downloads and install latest flash... Every not so often when adobe updates flash this script needs update as well..
I don't know if this is because of Flash 9 or my hardware....I just moved to Ubuntu full time with Hardy, on a stock Dell Inspiron 600m. It has onboard graphics, but I'm pretty sure flash videos worked fine back on XP. I don't get crashes, but most videos (youtube, etc.) can get a little choppy at some times. The audio is usually ok, though, I think.
I did enable all the compiz stuff, though. I wonder if I upgraded the RAM (only have 512MB currently), or tried the new v10 if it would be any better?
Is that I have personally never experienced problems with flash, it was even easy to install it, and I have used ubuntu ever since breezy badger times. That's the problem and it is that the experiences are quite inconsistent, with a huge group of people always having issues.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Somewhat off topic, or in an overlapping corner of the topic -
I don't run Linux anymore, only so many hours in the day, but I do a lot of Actionscript widget coding for $$$. Flash has some memory leaks that range from annoying to deal breaker. I honestly like AS 3 as I don't know Java well enough to write one man dev team internet apps and AS lets me do that. but ... If Adobe doesn't solve garbage collection and soon AJAX or (new buzzword) starts looking a lot better for low end desktop / web application development.
Hey I'll sign up to an SVG / Javascript solution if one presents itself but I've been saying that for a while.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Then people would never look at the code, and the code would never get written. Which in itself would be a big hint that something is wrong.
In any project there is at least the amount of committers who have read the code (or the relevant parts to their commits). Most likely much more than that number. Your logic doesn't hold for any project with a decent number of developers. Unless everyone who has ever looked at the code is working together against us. Or all the developers code blind-folded and coincidentally create software.
The flash player VM is horribly broken in many ways.
We have been developing a couple huge applications based on Flash/Flex/AIR and we have run into a number of annoying issues.
For one the flash player will never fully release objects from memory. It's garbage collection cleans up about 25% of the references in memory, but there are very low-level event listeners in the VM itself that hold on to objects, and in-turn those objects have other listeners that hold on to other objects.
Our application starts out at about 80MB of memory usage (which in itself is bad enough) and within a few hours its well over 500MB.
Adobe ignores this and in some cases becomes horribly defensive about it.
Second annoyance is that run-time errors are never reported in the non-debug player. Flash will continue trying to execute the rest of the movie even if it has had a horrible error. To compound the issue AIR does not have a debug version of its runtime so when we receive errors from our clients we have very little go on because by the time the application manifests the error in some sort of visual fashion it might have been hundreds of commands back.
Flex/AIR will never take off unless they fix these issues. The framework is a joke and AIR leaks memory faster than the Titanic took on water.
"...It has occurred to me that $(SOME_PET_PEEVE_SOFTWARE_ISSUE_OF_USER_GROUP_XYZ) on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system..."
Your needs are vastly different than mine. Because you fail to understand this point you will never understand the "major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as..." is actually you .
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
I'm running Opera on the AMD64 port of Debian unstable and Flash works great for me. If you're having a problem, you're doing it wrong.
Maybe not
His reply was, "yeah me and everyone I know in this industry try to get the programmers to put as much flashy flash stuff up on our different marketing web sites and advertising banners as possible... and loving it! We won't stop."
Why won't they stop? Well, because people pay attention to the stuff, you can't help but be drawn to moving images vs. static content - it's how our brains are designed.
What surprises me, following on from this, is that doubleclick (or some other online Ad company) hasn't paid to implement flash properly on Linux to ensure that all the ads can be viewed on that platform.
Don't get us-versus-them with me - I've been using Linux since SLS and it's my primary operating system. What's all this "us" stuff anymhow? We should be able to look at the faults honestly without getting so defensive though.
On Windows (and to a lesser extent OSX), you actually don't need to research before you buy, and with Linux fairly often you need to restrict yourself to a subset of slightly dated wireless adapters if you want things to work smoothly without (at least) exercising your compiler. Ndiswrapper is a partial solution if you don't mind system instability.
nvidia and ati graphics cards are most of the market, and if you use the open drivers, you don't get much in the way of 3d (what little you get has poor performance). The closed drivers are, as I said, difficult to configure properly.
Let's say you were to want to write a game - trying to figure out what permutation(s) of sound and graphics libraries to use is a major ordeal, and supporting all the varieties of system configurations people have as they pretend to be another (badly) is not a pretty thing to ask a development studio to do. DirectX is a lousy API, but at least it's a single API - if you want to do sound for linux, do you want to do ALSA? OSS? esound? pulse-audio? arts? nas? Which of these can you assume is configured and working properly on a given system? How about that 3d? Most linux users don't bother, even those interested in games.. it's not an easy platform to target. Note that I'm talking about linux as being more than just the kernel - it may not be the kernel's job to play video, nor (entirely) the kernel folks fault that linux is a poor platform for these things, but looking at the bigger picture, it's a problem.
Foxconn is an exceptionally bad example - it wasn't what I meant. On most systems, ACPI support is just "iffy" and you're wandering into an ugly area if you expect ACPI-dependent features to work (suspend/hibernate, throttling, etc). This is partly a matter of inadequate vendor support, although there needs to be a lot more care given to userland stuff too.
I do call it negligible. What portion of their catalogs can be loaded with linux? A handful of servers? Great. That's not significant yet.
I'm not a linux hater, I'm an honest unix old-timer. A lot of these issues are/were not there with traditional unix vendors because they controlled their hardware and had a very good team of engineers making things mostly "just work" out of the box. Any Irix install on SGI hardware has/had very few problems of these sort. Any OSX install on a Mac is the same. Windows isn't quite as polished in these areas, but it's simple to bring a system to the state of having all the hardware running and everything working as smoothly as windows ever does (thanks to good vendor support). These platforms also are/were not so bad to write multimedia software for.
Linux is great for stuff on a fairly vanilla desktop if you don't need good sound or 3d acceleraton - these areas are not given much attention and it shows. If you want to run Linux on a laptop and fully use your hardware, you have a research project ahead of you.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
This problem has been a huge annoyance, but there is a way around in Arch Linux, there should be similar solutions for other distro's.
For the Arch Linux workaround, nspluginwrapper is used to get around the limitation with a whole bunch of 32bit libs. The full details are on the Arch Linux Wiki.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_Flash_on_Arch64
cheers,
"It works for me".
To the techie (engineering manager, web admin etc) just sees this as more hard work.
The marketing/sales person sees this as revenue/business development opportunity.
This does not only apply to external companies, but also within a company. If you're a techie (chances you are if you're on /.) and you have an idea that might make the company money then don't try sell it to the engineering people (who will generally try to squash the idea) - rather tell the marketing people (who see it as a chance to make money).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I know lots of people will smile when reading this comment but I actually report issues to Adobe, especially alpha/beta testing Flash 10. They are NOT very communicative but I see some stuff I reported has been fixed. I am also on PowerPC (still) which MS overlords decided to drop support as early as Silverlight 2.
Another issue with closed source/large company software is, they can't include "crash reporter" so they don't actually know who crashes doing what. It is problem on OS X too but at least we send them to Apple, I don't know what Apple does with them though. For that part, also thank to paranoids and conspiracy theorists. They can obviously have "crash dump" code attached and next day, you would see "Adobe spies on their Linux users!!!" type of story.
Anyway, if you know a specific site triggering crash, you better report to Adobe. Linux is _very_ important to them in light of recent developments. If they didn't care, you wouldn't see Flash 10 beta shipped for Linux.
For "Real Networks" and "Adobe", realistic companies not spoiled like Microsoft, Linux support is passport to "devices" and somehow OSX/future iPhone. Don't think they don't care.
How in the world is Flash "critical"?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
i'd really like to know what browser version, what extentions/add-ons if any, and what version of flash people are using. I'm seeing flash complaints everywhere, yet I've had zero problems with Gentoo, Suse and Ubuntu (all the latest and greatest), FF3.0, and Flash 9.
It seems to me, that for the most part, these technologies make websites slow, annoying, buggy, and browser incompatible.
The primary purpose of these technologies seems to be either advertisements, or looky-what-I-can-do.
Current versions of Flash have worked fine on Linux for well over a year. If you're still having trouble, your computer is broken in some other way that is affecting Flash.
Lots of stuff in Linux is broken, has been broken, and will continue to be broken as long as developers know how to spend a minute to fix their own, and simply move on to creating new and shiny stuff. They assume you know how to spend the same minute, but that's seldom the case. What you end up with is crapware, but by golly it'll do a lotta stuff, albeit poorly.
I watch YouTube videos all day, and I use Gentoo. Something is wrong with your PC.
It is very simple. They have absolutely no motivation either way, because they have a monopoly for certain things on the web. And because there is only one player (proprietary or not) it is also a gaping security hole. Millions of installs, monoculture (only one client), security nightmare. And the browser becomes the OS, because the apps are now net based.
We need other clients, and since no company seems to do it (like for example PDF where the Foxit PDF reader is a very good alternative that I recommend for speed and security) open source seems the way to go. And the open source client could even be compiled for Win32, Linux AMD64, OpenBSD, IPhone, ...
I would be willing to pay money for something like that. Does Gnash (or something similar) have a way to donate? Because I think lots of people might want an alternate client. Maybe they would even get enough money to fund a developer. Maybe Mozilla should be asked to lend a hand?
We've had plenty of those already.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Why does Flash on Linux suck? Because there's no free authoritative specification. That leaves only partial documentation (API documentation is not everything) and a closed source binary only reference implementation.
The lack of diversity of flash implementations means that even if you wrote down a good specification, if there were any difference between the implementation that everyone used and the specification, really the reference implementation would "win" the political value.
This is why projects like gnash are left to do a lot of black box analysis as a prerequisite for building a new implementation, and it'll always be a catch-up game.
And if anyone things flash on Linux is bad, try flash on FreeBSD... sheesh.
-bugg
Tell YouPorn that.
I am a long time Linux and Ubuntu user. I had little problems with flash for many years. Occasionally a menu would sit behind an animation, but that was not much of an issue. Then with Ubuntu's switch to pulse audio the wheels fell off. Firefox crashing was a regular occurrence. I tried Opera and discovered that it would not crash, but when a flash error occurred it would display a white box and do nothing. Often all that was needed was a refresh. Not great, but better. Reading news groups pointed to pulse as the culprit. I have three Ubuntu and one Debian Lenny machines and they are all crash free, but the solution was a little complex. The Debian machine does not have pulse audio and uses flash 10 beta 2 and "just works". In Ubuntu I had to install flash 9 from non-free, then download flash ten beta 2 and unzip but not install. Then unistall libflashsupport through Synaptic. Then, as a super user, copy the libflashplayer.so from 10 beta to /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/ and overwrite the old one.
Firefox now appears stable and YouTube has not crashed yet.
For Ubuntu this should be a high priority fix. All this talk about propriety software is meaningless to an end user who just wants to play on YouTube. Like it or not flash is everywhere on the Internet and if you can't use it then you either jump through hoops to fix it, or if you are a noobe you simply give up and go back to XP.
To use the Internet properly you must have a working Flash, Adobe have provided a Linux client. Now let us make sure it works on every distro in every instance.
FOSS flash player (incomplete): http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
FOSS silverlight (also incomplete): http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
My box runs ubuntu 8.04, it's a 64bit system and flash is working (in FF3). FF3 tells me I'm using a plugin called Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124. I never came across a flash application that wouldn't run. And I don't remember any fuss when installing the plugin. Hm.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Flash has always been somewhat unstable, hence Jobs nixing it for the iphone.
Lets face it, linux is a miniscule market share with users who don't want to pay for software. Adobe is a software company. What is their motivation to invest in something with 0% return?
How in the world is Flash "critical"?
Well, I did put quotes around it for a reason. Anyway, to a lot of desktop users, not being able to view Youtube videos or flash-only sites is a deal-breaker. Personally, I don't care for Flash and I keep it turned off almost always, but I'm in the minority.
I could flame you for suggesting to replace a 5-year old proprietary format with a 10-year old proprietary format
QuickTime follows a published international standard. If your concern is patents, what non-proprietary format were you thinking of? Ogg Theora?
Flash is proprietary.
Gnash and haXe, which work with the same public SWF format as the proprietary Flash Player and Flex SDK, are free software.
(Yeah, I know about Moonlight -- how long till that gets hit with patents from Microsoft, though, if it starts to matter?)
Given that Microsoft helps make Moonlight, it would appear that Microsoft wholeheartedly licenses its patents to Moonlight. Key parts of Microsoft's contribution to Moonlight are under the MSPL, a GPLv3-compatible permissive free software license similar to the Apache license.
More posts that should be put in a distro-specific forum, instead of the slashdot front page.
If something affects all popular distributions of GNU/Linux, I don't see why that should keep it off the /. front page.
Theres no distro name, no kernel or browser type or version given, no way anyone can help him.
Would it work to have said something like "My customers have been able to reproduce the failures on both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, and on Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, and Linspire?
Like many other respondents here, I watch dozens of YouTube videos every week and I never have any problems viewing them. Given the error rate that you describe it sounds like you either have an old flash player or else something is misconfigured in your system.
-deane
Adobe doesn't care about Linux. It's nothing personal, they just don't.
Sig this!
I'm not trying to hide my bias - most of the work we do is in Actionscript.
But I agree as much as the next guy that making a typical website in Flash is stupid. So is unnecessary required video, low-contrast color schemes, gratuitous music, required Javascript for basic navigation, poor text-only / accessibility support, and many other things that are common on all together too many sites.
There's a bunch of reasons to use Flash, but the biggest one is that it lets you do something no other platform does - create rich, full featured, object oriented applications that just work with a wide installed user base, on a variety of platforms, with a minimum* of security risk to the user.
If you're only thinking Flash Video, you're thinking too small. Think "any application in the world that does not need direct hardware access or to maximize its access to computing resources" It runs over the web, it runs locally, and it runs the same.
Really, Flash shouldn't have this crown. Java applets should. But they don't, because of how that played out in the 90s. The behavior isn't consistent, and developing rich applications for it was tedious at best.
For the programmers reading, you don't want to develop apps in Flash, which is a super-glorified animation tool. But you want to develop in Adobe Flex, which is a wonderful tool with a for-pay IDE, but a free CLI compiler. The OUTPUT is a Flash swf, but the INPUT no longer has a binary animation file, and all of the layout supports inheritance. And the crossover is tremendous and seamless, so you can use whatever your animators/designers make in Flash in a blink.
To address some other points:
Even requiring a recent version of Flash, Flash does generally have a higher installed user base than any other single system. Obviously "HTML" per se has a higher base, but if you're doing anything modestly complex you have to break apart the major-different IE versions from everything else, and last I checked I believe Flash 9 has a higher installed base than any family of HTML rendering. I believe these stats were based on computers "active on the web" - so it doesn't count things that aren't hooked up to the internet currently, many of which presumably have old versions of IE.
Flash Player isn't as open and crossplatform as I'd like, but in general it's been getting better on both counts. Reading the comments of people who actually described there system, it seems like there's problems running Flash Player with 64bit browsers in Linux, and not with 32bit browsers...
*I didn't say NO security risk. But as platforms for running totally arbitrary third party code go, I don't know of anything that does a BETTER job.
Starting as early as 2002 Actionscript is an OOP language.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
So, Flash lovers, what, exactly, is flash good for
that cannot be done with industry standard
formats? (other than make money for Adobe)
Video? Use mpeg. There are several FLOSS
players for mpeg.
If your web site requires flash, many many people
will not be able to view your website.
Seriously - the next time you are about to post a rant about how great Linux is and how it's been 'ready for the desktop' for years now, and how it does everything you could ever want....
Remember that crap as simple as Flash doesn't work for crap.
Linux....just as broken and behind the times as it's ever been - but hey, it's free!
What surprises me, following on from this, is that doubleclick (or some other online Ad company) hasn't paid to implement flash properly on Linux to ensure that all the ads can be viewed on that platform.
Lotta good that would do. Like many other linux users I know, I have a bunch of *.doubleclick.com entries in my /etc/hosts file mapping those hosts to 127.0.0.1. When I spot another doubleclick add, I add another hostname to the list. Right now there are 40 of them.
But I don't see to many doubleclick flash ads, either, or anyone else's, because I've had flashblock installed in firefox for several years. To bad it doesn't work with all browsers; not supporting flashblock just persuades me not to use that browser.
Hmmm ... Maybe this is why I hadn't actually noticed that flashblock has problems on linux. Except that I have watched a bunch of youtube videos on my linux box, and I don't recall ever seeing it crash during one of them. Just to be sure, I just paused typing this, went to youtube, and played half a dozen videos on my new ubuntu 8.04 machine. It worked fine (after I unblocked yet another flash site for one of the videos ;-).
Just out of curiosity, is there some reliable way to demo the problem? I don't seem to be stumbling across one.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
For anyone who's wondering: the standard answer to the 64-bit question is that you're too lazy to port Adobe's 135,000+ line Tamarin project to 64-bit architecture. Apparently if you just go and do that, 64-bit versions of Flash player will instantly rain down from the sky.
So now you know. Be a good little user and get that done by noon won't you? Stop bothering Adobe with your silly questions.
I am surprised to hear about so many of my fellow linuxers having problems with flash (okay... so I don't get out so much).
I'm using Fedora 8 64 bit with Firefox 2 and have installed the adobe 32 flash player and the nspluginwrapper. It works great with no crashes, lockups or slowdowns.
The only problem I have is when I go to some of these local TV websites to see some of their "breaking video" The problem is that they tend to layer their "reports" in commercials and promos that you have to endure before you get to their (usually amateurish and brain dead) "feature". As we skip from commercial to commercial the whole thing grinds to a halt.... actually now that I think of it, that might actually be a blessing in disguise. Never mind.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought Adobe basically opened up the Flash API definitions, etc. Enabling anyone to port Flash to any device if they so choose.
If that's the case, why don't you get together with a few others and start building "OpenFlash" for Linux?
Yes we do...
And if you've only used sites featuring those technologies as ads. You really need to browse the web a bit more.
Or get out there and try using some web applications that don't feature JavaScript, Flash, etc.
They suck, they're slow, they're a pain in the but to use. Requiring 10 steps and page reloads for what could be a single page load.
sure, but *someone* can keep this crap off the front page. I mean they dont post dupes or anyth-- bah, nevermind
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
This blog http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/ is written by one of the people working on the linux version of Flash and explains some stuff about working on Flash (somewhere in the archives is an explanation of why there is no 64 bit native Flash player yet IIRC)
The explanation is on the net somewhere. The crash is caused by a conflict in sound software attached to your distro. There is a cure but I can't recall the steps. You'll have to try the forums for your distro to get the cure.
From the HOWTO on the 1.0 version from the "C&C: generals" page you linked to:
4. Once the installation is done, find yourself a no-cd crack and replace the original game.dat and generals.exe with the cracked ones.
I don't consider a requirement of installing a no-cd crack as being good enough to say that a game runs in Wine (see this: "... some would advocate the use of illegally modified or "cracked" games, Wine does not support, advocate, or even view this as a solution").
However, it seems reasonable to consider the other games to be working under Wine — I haven't run Oblivion myself, but RA2 and Starcraft run fine (although I do occasionally have issues with RA2 on a slow computer).
Ask me about repetitive DNA
So there is no version of Flash that is open source then?
Actually, a month or two ago, Adobe started the Open Screen project. While this isn't an open source flash per-se, it does open up the chance for people to start working on a better port of Flash to Linux. So for anyone complaining about Linux on Flash: patches welcome.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
I had the same flashplayer problems with Mandriva 2008.1. YouTube videos constantly crashing in Firefox 3.0, etc. I uninstalled libflashsupport, which was automatically included in Mandriva, and installed the new flashplayer 10 beta. No more crashes at all. On my wife's laptop, all I did was uninstall libflashsupport, and left her Firefox 2.0 and flashplayer 9 intact, and it seemed to eliminate the crashing, as well. I, too, had almost given up on finding a solution. This definitely works on Mandriva, at least.
No, they're busy counting their Google supplied money.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Didn't Adobe recently completely open all Flash specs needed to create an open source Flash player and creator? Or did I miss something in those announcements?
Firefox 3.0 and Adobe Flash plugin on Ubuntu 8.0. Actually it works better than on my XP machine, cause I can zoom in properly. There must be some hardware specific problems that some users are experiencing.
I'm not a Linux graybeard by any means. I installed Ubuntu back on July 4, and I can honestly say that I haven't booted into Windows in almost two weeks. I haven't needed or wanted to. (I spend most of my time playing with the LAMP stack.)
YouTube works fine, as does every other Flash site I visit. I had an issue the first time, did a GIS for a solution, did whatever it said, and I've been fine ever since. No browser crashes or anything, and this is 64 bit Linux. Was it as easy as it is in Windows? No. But it wasn't terribly hard, either.
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
Why should a closed source company such as Adobe promote open source software such as Linux? It goes completely against its goals.
Just look at the software that gives Adobe its huge bucket-o-cash:
Flash MX (You know, for authoring)
Premiere
Photoshop
Linux users (including me) completely hate that closed source model. For the Adobe execs, supporting Linux would be like allowing the enemy to enter their territory, IMHO. So they support Windows, knowing that the more time people can't install Linux, they'll still depend on a proprietary Operating System, with its proprietary applications.
In other words, they scratch Microsoft's back, and Microsoft will scratch theirs.
Otherwise, I can't find a valid reason why they wouldn't support Linux. Laziness, perhaps? When you got practically 100% (Adobe) of the 95% (Windows) of the Market, why bother with the stupid complaints of people who will never buy your products, anyway?
Flash video works fine in Kubuntu 8.04. But you do have a point. Audio and 3D driver support is piss-poor in Linux.
Choices, choices. Choice is good! But trying to support every competing sound system is not the way to provide it. At last count, there were SEVEN different sound systems available on my system, and none of my applications supports more than two or three. If we ever want to see Linux become a target for commercial software development (read: games), then we need to standardize the available APIs. The leading distros each need to pick ONE sound system and bundle only applications that support that sound system. And may the best distro win.
yes, there are tools for SVG: inkscape.org and both audio and video tags will be in SVG spec version 1.2
Yes, but see the difference? In my browser, right now this instant, I can click those two links above and see video. Right now. The instant.
Call me crazy, but I assign more value to things that actually, demonstrably, exist.
Comment of the year
I use adblock with the filterset.g updater; hosts file loopbacks ... old-skool!
If Linux is gaining all this "market share" it's getting a substantial number of folks without the nous to block the ads nor apply fixes/hacks to get flash working.
Because if they don't, eventually the open source community will reverse engineer all their crap and put it out there for free without any involvement from them and they'll just be left sucking hind tit.
Thanks for bringing that to everyone's attention (I'm the author of the guide).
The instructions are a little shaky for 64bit users at the moment, though. Hardy's version of the user-land ALSA libraries are too old to function well with PulseAudio, and it's difficult to package updated 32bit libraries that already exist in the massive ia32-lib package.
Just look at the signs, Flash is broken on Linux, a x86_64 bit version of flash has taken 5+ years in the making, and the whole purpose of flash is to make little animations with bright lights to amuse an idiot into loving your website or for directing people to a product, who are not smart enough to use the Site Map. Flash is a bad technology, and quite frankly, adobe does not care about anyone intelligent enough to make decisions for themselves, be they Linux or x86_64...
Not running Flash smoothly isn't keeping Linux from going mainstream. Linux supporters are keeping Linux from overtaking Windows. When the Linux community at large drops their holier-than-thou attitude and puts forth the effort to create a Windows killer distro, Flash will be nothing more then a line of the checklist. Until then, Linux bigots - and Apple snobs - will sit on the sidelines while the rest of the world moves on.
It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system.
I've been hearing that argument for years. I remember back in 1999 hearing how Linux would be ready for the desktop in 2001. Years have passed since then and it still isn't.
Because flash still sucks! :-P
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
What are you, delusional? Do you think anyone who's a non-geek even know what the Internet Archive or Creative Commons are? And why do you use the word "broken" so incorrectly? Flash and Silverlight work. When something doesn't work its broken. Something isn't broken just because you don't LIKE it.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I'm running linux/Ubuntu and watching youtube and other flash videos every day. And now, slashdot is telling me that in the real world, that does not happen. It is an amazing feeling I must tell you.
...proprietary "de-facto" standards are evil. Flash is a "standard" much too closely held by one company, and even if it caters to multiple platforms it insists on being the only developer of a closed client to support the data format and actively discourages community or other third party development, open OR closed.
Your wife isn't alone in suffering from unstable Flash on Windows XP. It isn't a problem with any particular version of the OS ot even the browser for that matter (flash performance on IE is also substandard in my opinion). The problam is that the developers responsible for ALL flash player development at Adobe vomit out the some pretty wretched, barely-beta-quality code.
I think there has to be some insistence on conformance to *real* standards by major players on the 'net. So much of what is on-line that uses Flash could be done with actual standards. It was quite the brain fart to come up with using flash player to transport video when a non-vendor-specific standard practice could've been picked with little additional effort. It annoys me that something like SVG or even a Java applet could've been used to show stock charts on Google finance and the like but instead we are stuck with some senile flash object.
I'm generally averse to government regulation, but I do think governments can play a role here: When awarding web development contract, make it a stipulation that properly vettted, vendor-independent standards must be used exclusevely, perhaps specifically mentioning that the use of flash player is completely banned until (if ever) the standard is made open. I hate to day it, but even MSFT's Siverlight is mmore open than Flash (at least it lets others make interoperable client software with Moonlight--not obly if they'd let a community-developed Moonlight client run on Windows to provide competition).
Perhaps large corporate users could set good examples too and ban flash from all external and internal web apps in their enterprise: our employer has a "reference client" on which such apps must run without the need to download dependencies from the 'net. If only that reference client did not contain the flash player...
There are a lot of complaints bout artsy-fartsy "web page artists" who love to load up pages with nothing but flash objects. Well, people are lazy by nature, and if you can wow a PHB with flaming, rotating logos and animated, fading, translucent menus most easily by using flash that is what they'll use. If only PHBs would grab sone sense ad see that the whole WWW is sick because of bandwidth hogging, unstable proprietary crap that adds literally zero REAL value to the web experience that other established technologies can't do just as well.
iffy ACPI support on a number of systems,
Because vendors like Foxconn locking us out and killing any OS other than windows is our problem?
Matthew Garrett is the kernel ACPI guru
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/94998.html
Summary: Almost all problems caused by bugs in Linux, one problem caused by BIOS vendors interpreting the ACPI specification differently to the Linux implementation and trivially worked around. No sabotage.
Later on he got mailbombed by Ryan Farmer, the guy that originally screamed Foxconn conspiracy
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/97151.html
Things I have learned in the past 24 hours
Websites that claim you'll never be able to get them taken down are quite easy to get taken down
Legal threats are an excellent way of obtaining information
The IP address used to subscribe me (and several others) to a vast number of mailing lists was 68.57.223.4. Which seems to belong to Ryan Farmer. "Fucking hero", my arse.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Yep, The lack of Windows-quality flash support in Linux is the single worst thing about the operating system.
...well, in a way anyways. 64-bit Windows users must have a 32-bit browser installed and running under the WoW Win32 emulator. Under 64-bit Linux you can use nspluginwrapper as an alternative to a 32-bit browser.
A Flash crash using a 32-bit browser may crash the entire browser (on Wndows, perhaps even the whole WoW process). On Linux, nspluginwrapper, apart from encapsulating the 32-bit exceution within the realm of the plugin instead of the browesr, seems to run the plugin in a separate process (or a well-isolated thread at least). So, that nasty Flash object that crashes in Windows or any other 32 bit browser simply kills the flash object--you get a blank square but at least you can continue browsing relatively uninterrupted. A page reload, or at worst a restart of the browser at your leisure, will restore the flash operation.
I've heard that you can even use nspluginwrapper on 32-bit Liux--even if you don't need it for compatibility it will add stability.
Poor Windows users have to suffer with browser crashes as nspluginwrapper doesn't seem to be available (and of course it wouldn't work at all with IE anyways, if that is your browser preference).
FYI, flash was designed, developed and continues to be maintained by a dozen stoned chimpanzees. For some unspecified "technical design" reasons they insist that migration to 64 bit is exremely challenging--so much so that Adobe's "TechNote" about it has said "Adobe is working on Flash Player support for 64-bit platforms as part of our ongoing commitment to the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player. We have not yet announced timing or release dates." for at least THREE YEARS now.
I might add that these stoned chimps only convene to do Flash player development part time, when they aren't busy trying to finish Duke Nukem Forever. I suspect that 64-bit flash release will be shortly after release of their main preoccupation.
Adobe is obviously no friend of Linux.
Flash is abysmal on Linux, this is true. However, I find Firefox in general to be sluggish and less stable and more of a memory hog on Linux than in Windows, so Flash isn't alone.
Adobe has never made a version of Photoshop for Linux, even though, most likely it would only require a couple of code changes that their staff could probably handle easily.
Adobe does not like Open Source. They want to sell their proprietary software, and I get the feeling they think ANY FOSS is bad for them, and honestly they are probably right. I'm looking forward to the day when The Gimp and moonlight completely bury flash and photoshop.
Let them rot in hell, along with MS, Creative, and all the other corporations that are so feverishly and fiendishly trying to hold onto their markets and fight FOSS tooth and nail.
I for one am happy to do 90% of what I need to do in the GIMP anyway. For the other 10%, Photoshop works well in enough in XP under Virtualbox, and then I just close that VM away back into the bliss of freedom and more efficient FOSS living.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
.... and if you think I paid $500 for Photoshop, or $100 for Windows XP, you are deluding yourself in the extreme. I actively loathe having to use either, ever, and certainly would not pay for the experience. Further, I would much rather have the cracked versions of either than the stock retail ones which are always slow, buggy, and full of DRM.
I'm a big fan of TinyXP, rather than stock Windows, and in particular it is VERY snappy under Virtualbox. If you haven't tried it out, install Virtualbox, and give it a whirl. Faster, smaller, cleaner, and easier than any other stock Windows install, by several orders of magnitude.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
You mean like invading other countries?
(Sorry, just saw some remarks from G.W. Bush, C. Rize and J. McCain about Russia invading Georgia and could not resist.
BTW I'm sorry for what's happening in Georgia but at the end I think I know shit about what's really happening there and I know only slightly more about what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968. But given that, how did the US got rid of Hussein? And in which century?)
hany
die Flash, please die! kthxbai!
so say we all
I've been pretty disappointed with flash on linux from version 7 through most of the 10 betas, but the latest 10 release candidate (out for a week or so) has actually been stable and fairly speedy.
The main thing I'm looking forward to is Speex encoding on the client; death to NellyMoser Asao!
There worse : Flash on *BSD.
FreeBSD only has an obsolete Flash 7 (and still as unstable as nitroglycerine, try it with KDE4 Konqueror, it does nothing but eat 100% cpu).
OpenBSD can only run Flash through a browser running Linux emulation, ie. Opera and nothing else.
Not sure about DragonFly and NetBSD, but it's probably the same.
{{.sig}}
It has occurred to me that problems with Flash on non-Windows systems are the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Flash as a viable web framework. No matter how stably, smoothly, efficiently, and correctly it runs under Windows, the public will continue to view it as second-rate if Flash keeps crashing or does not work completely on Linux, FreeBSD, Symbian, Google Android.
I'm sure it is too late for anyone to read my comment but...
Other than being a pain to install on linux (and it has to be reinstalled every time you upgrade your browser), Flash 9 works fine.
The real problem is that there is no linux version of Shockwave. So i can't play most "flash" games b/c they actually use Shockwave.
Adobe still hasn't released a native Flash Client for Vista x64 and as such I still can't play Flash vids on my Vista Media Center. Should tell you how crappy Adobe development is right there. I'm just surprised there's no 64-bit browser embedded universal player that'll take care of flash, quicktime, and all that stuff so there's only one plugin to update..
I run linux--Suse 9.3 and I don't have problems with YouTube videos and you don't give a lot of info. What flavor/version are running? What's your cache size? Do you ever empty the damn thing? In other words, is the player the problem?
I would lie if I said, that this made me switch, and I definitely understand, that this is NOT the fault of the BRILLIANT group of people developing GPL apps and Linux itself.
However I remember this flash crap was one of the final ones that made me switch to OSX. The other one was X drivers and a wide-screen issue that caused my wide screen to 'shrink back' to 4:3 after every screen save.
Then again, I am not an OSX commercial, I am just saying that after almost 14 years of Linux usage I had to switch, as I spent more time fixing little stupid things instead of working. Then again, I am still using it on servers very happily, it is just the desktop where I retired it.
Argh ,,, BTW I am a web (among many other things) developer, and that FF crash and flash thing was getting on my nerves. At the end I constantly had to have a windows machine running FF and IE to check the sites I was working on.
Just my 2c
Macromedia is used for many educational program.
Without Macromedia support, Linux is very hard to enter the education world.
I've been using Ubuntu and Debian on few machines for months. I use Firefox, and Flash. I haven't noticed any problems, so I wonder how big this problem is? Until I read this, Flash support certainly didn't come to mind as a problem for Linux on the desktop.
...then they better get their Flash stuff together. More-and-more rapid e-learning solutions (the vast majority, I'd say) are delivered via Flash technologies. Sure, Flash gets a bad rap for the stupid blinky ads, but don't overlook the value of Flash as an Interactive Multimedia training solution. Software simulations, boring page-turning HR training, customer-service "role"-based training...mostly all done with some sort of Flash based rapid e-learning tool, such as Articulate or Captivate. Anytime a customer comes to us for deliverable e-learning, our first question is "can your run Flash, because if you can't, it's gonna cost you a lot more".
Is there an app that is truly essential to the everyday net user and/or developer that is written in Flash? A video player (as big as youtube might be) is but an applet that serves only video. Sure, there're some really good UI and games written in Flash, but they are non-essential. That is, I can live without them. And ads: I really can do without them too.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
Isn't this a great situation for a startup to take on?
To all those out there who decry flash as a threat to the internet, etc etc
I am currently developing a kiosk style application using Flash. This is the type of app that would be overkill to develop in a standard language using OpenGL or a Game engine for graphics and yet still one which requires better graphic support than is capable using html and javascript.
It needs to be able to stream video and audio, needs animation, needs an http stack to communicate with the streaming server and needs logic to make it interactive rather than just a demo.
Sure I could host it on a Windows PC but since it will be deployed on hundreds of thousands of devices that would be cost prohibitive.
So what I'm trying to say is that not all Flash applications are built to annoy you. This one is being built to entertain you while you are 30,000 ft in the air and 6+ hours from your destination.
So if you want to have a great in flight experience... support Flash on Linux.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The whole story is very embarassing, true. My recommendation is to overwork the plugin structure of the web browsers, so that a plugin crash does not necessarily crash the browser. And when such a plugin crash happens, simply outline it in a browser page, e.g. "The Plugin 'Adobe Flash Player' has crashed" or something the like. This would outline, what actually happened, and who is to blame.
from my laptop:
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_I_banned_flash.png
Let alone other platforms, AmigaOS, BeOS, Haiku, Hurd, MiNT ?
Not even all Linux are supported (tried it in Linux-ppc or Linux-arm ?).
flash sites do not deserve the name "website". The web is about interoperability.
Perhaps they're doing it on purpose, but to harm Linux for the sake of harming Linux; rather to harm Linux in order to avoid its wider acceptance and, as a result, their future need to develop software for three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux). On the other hand, perhaps if it were easier to code for Linux, more commercial software would be made for it which doesn't suck so badly. On the other (other) hand, perhaps Linux works correctly, which is why that program crashes, whereas Windows is so buggy that whatever would cause it to crash just silently goes and overwrites stuff in memory, which isn't noticed at all because there are so many bugs and viruses affecting Windows that crashes are written off as "oh, I need a new computer" by idiot lusers who don't know that by reinstalling Windows, it will be as if they got a new computer, but without spending the money. Use nLite to customize your Windows installation disc by altering all of Microsoft's defaults to their opposite (for example, DO show file extensions, DO NOT show animations, etc). By switching every option in Windows to its opposite, you actually get a pretty decent operating system. Disclaimer: I use a Mac and run Ubuntu and a homebrew LFS system in VMware. No need for Windows anymore. Between Mac OS X and Linux, you can do anything. Even watch Flash crap in YouTube in one window while executing buildroot in your LFS system in another window while figuring out why Samba isn't working quite the way you want it to in Ubuntu in yet another window. With all these "windows" open, you'd think this is Mac OS X Vista. Which is what will happen when Apple buys out Microsoft in a few years. Or Mac OS XII Bronco, which is what will happen when OS 12 versions are named after horses after OJ Simpson buys a 51% share in the company.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Guess we have our answer...
The killer-app for Flash these days is video playback, a la YouTube. This is obviously a bit ridiculous given that every OS has a native video playback plugin, but predictable given that they all have *different* native video playback plugins.
The .flv format (and the codecs it wraps--see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flv) is now the universal video format, because it works (in theory) in any browser with Flash.
What we need, then, is a FOSS plug-in (cross-platform, cross browser) that can simply play back .flv objects. The code to do that exists in the FFMPEG project and/or the VLC project. If I had a spare million dollars, I would totally fund it.
Most of what is wrong with the web could be trivially fixed if every browser started randomly offsetting the position of each element it renders by one pixel either up, down, left, or right. Any Javascript APIs should deny that the element has been offset.
I can only see video on the first link. There's no working implementation for the second one that I can download and get working (I even tried their official site), and either way, all the other people here in the office would have to download a plugin to get that one working, too. It does show a video, but that's with the embedded mplayer video player, which I don't think was your point? There's no Mac within throwing distance, but unless you have a new Intel-based Mac, it doesn't work there, either (Flash will work).
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Flash mostly works for me ( Ubuntu Hardy Heron ), but I occasionally see spontaneous browser crashes when watching videos on hulu.com. There's also this wierd thing (I think it's a Firefox 3 compatibility issue because I didn't have this problem until Ubuntu upgraded FF2 to FF3) where when I try to enter Full Screen mode in their video player, and it actually does go fullscreen for about 1 second, then automatically 'collapses' back to non-fullscreen viewing mode (where it's embedded in the web page).
Neither are major problems, but are minor irritants.
As a FreeBSD user, I don't get proprietary closed-source Flash anyway. Boo hoo. Frankly, it makes the intertubes seem a lot more intelligent without it. I love the hypocrisy of the Linux movement: one year you hate Flash because it's proprietary, the next year you love it because Macromedia gave you a Linux binary. Now it's "broken" so you whine.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I remember in the late nineties websites used to stream porn using mpeg and you can always download the file. It's not like flash is the only option, just the current fad.
Because if they don't, eventually the open source community will reverse engineer all their crap and put it out there for free without any involvement from them and they'll just be left sucking hind tit.
Like the Gimp, wow. Thousands of Adobe users are migrating to it. Right.</sarcasm>
Well to be fair, Flash used to do a lot less and once upon a time (maybe 5-6 years ago) it was very feasible to combine SVG and a little Javascript to get a similar experience to what Flash was used for.
Actually it wasn't possible because when Flash was that simple, nothing reliably supported SVG except for a fairly klunky plugin provided by Adobe, ironically enough, which let you kind of use SVG as long as you were happy to present it inside a rectangular box after the user had gone through an ugly plugin installation process, and probably only on Windows PCs (from memory). Back around that time I remember a lot of people complaining about the lack of reliable SVG support, because the majority of stuff that was done in Flash (primarily irritating banner ads) could have been done much more nicely and standards compliantly using SVG and a little Javascript.
People who claim this now are probably continuing the same kinds of arguments from years like 2002. Since then, however, Adobe's made changes to later versions of Flash which has made it much more of an application development platform that goes far beyond everything for which SVG was intended.
The web was never meant for applications. Applications are per definition not part of the web, and recognising this, there are much better tools available for the purpose.
Actually, flash does work in 64-bit Linux, in a sad, hacked, bastardized sort of way.
For those using Ubuntu, check out "nspluginwrapper"
My flash is working on both 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu versions (feisty/hardy), as well as on an older 32-bit Debian machine. Both 2.x (Debian/Ubuntu) and 3.x versions of firefox (Ubuntu).
On the Debian box it seemed to have issues at times. On Ubuntu the only consistent issue I've really had is that sometimes when the browser screws up the "nspluginwrapper" (used to run 32-bit flash on 64-bit firefox) doesn't die when the browser is killed.
CPU consumption doesn't seem bad either. At least on my older P4 laptop I'm still able to run full-screen youtube stuff, with the only lag being due to slow internet. CPU usage is within tolerable limits, with the only times it gets crazy being due to some weird-ass ads likely doing things they shouldn't (to be fair, I've had runaway JavaScripts do the same).
Seems to me that flash support has actually worked a little better recently. My biggest complain would be that Adobe seems to have a serious case of cranial-rectal-inversion in regards to 64-bit support... as the architecture has been around more than long enough to make way to having native 64-bit browser support (sans extra wrappers)
Flash crashes on Windows and you expect the Linux version to work? Give me a break. As to the rest of the discussion, I don't mind Flash being used for video playback (ie YouTube), but requiring Flash to view the whole site is just plain dumb. Good way to alienate customers who don't live in places with broadband which contrary to what the FCC says is a rather large area.
Because I think he's dead on. One thing that silverlight has going for it is that it is easier to code for because you can use the tools that any monkey can use. Doesn't mean the code will be well structured or easy to maintain, or that it will scale, but that lots of little monkeys will do it, and with that army of monkeys, something compelling will come out and tip the scale toward silverlight. Besides, scalability in a browser probably doesn't matter at all. I think adding yet another stupid plugin into the browser wars is a bad idea, (especially when there is no support for ALL platforms and browsers) but that doesn't mean this won't happen to us, just like IE did.
a) The web wasn't meant to be anything other than a document exchange protocol.
b) The internet was meant only to be a strategic back-up communications system.
c) The web/internet is never meant to be anything other than it's users want it to be.
d) Your comment was the dumbest thing posted on August 19th.
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Computers by the way were never meant for applications. They were meant for calculations. Just happened to be some intelligent person decided they could do more than just calculations.
Computers were meant for business and military use. They were never intended to be personal.
Computers never meant to run graphics and to do 3D imagery.
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Can we have a much more stupid comment than that....lastly, people want applications that can communicate and work on the web. Therefore, the web is meant for applications.
I'm sorry if you're locked into desktop development and fail to realize that we're moving to a mobile computing environment. But you better get with the program.
I haven't owned a desktop in nearly 6 yrs. I wager in 20 yrs I won't even own a laptop anymore. Just a mobile computer device like a iPhone on steroids. And if I need extra processing I'll tap into a cloud.
...quite how little the real world cares about Linux on the desktop
If Linux was that popular, or that sensible an option then Flash would be working PERFECTLY in under a week, as it it, it would appear nobody who matters, cares.
Burn.
By the way, dispite what people say, and at least one makes sure they tell me every fucking day, if you replace Average Joe's Windows machine with Ubuntu, he wont go three months without doing all of the below:
A) Breaking it.
B) Hating it.
C) Missing thousands of Windows features.
Linux is NOT ready for the desktop, at the present rate it will NEVER be ready. You heard, NEVER. The people who swan around claiming that we're all prejudiced and Ubuntu is AS USER FRIENDLY as Windows are simply deluding themselves.
This should hurt, Apple took a Unix, and in 2 years create one of the most intuative, user friendly OSs around today.
The Linux community have been going strong for over 15 years and have produce a VERY VERY good server OS, and a Deskop OS held together with scotch tape, blutack and string.
By the way, I'm a Windows user.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Why does flash suck, period. Before I get flamed, I have a valid reason. Point in case: http:mycokerewards.com Go to that site and watch it eat your machine alive! Fucking turd-burglars stealing cycles from my box! For all the cash Coke has, you would think could come up with something better then that monstrosity!
...share, and Adobe doesn't give a flying fuck. And shouldn't.
+++OK ATH