Linux Now an Equal Flash Player

nerdyH writes "As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive. Now, with Microsoft pushing its Silverlight alternative, Adobe is touting the universality of its Flash format, which has penetrated '98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,' it claims. And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms. Welcome to the future." Handily enough, Real Networks released this summer RealPlayer 11 for Linux, the first release for which they've included a .deb package, and offers nightly builds of their Helix player, for which Linux is one of the supported platforms.

yay competition!

Now make them do the same with Photoshop.

Re:yay competition!

Now make them do the same with Photoshop.

Tomorrow MS will announce that Windows Paint runs under wine!

Some more equal than others...

Looks like they changed it during they beta to require glibc 2.4-based Linux distributions (RHEL 4, CentOS 4, Debian 4 are out) for stack-smashing protection.

Link [adobe.com].

Competition is good!

And this is a good example! Why change, update, or innovate if you have no competition? Throw a little in there and all of a sudden the things people actually wanted, are given!

The future?

There's still no 64-bit version yet!

Re:No 64-bit

My theory is that Adobe's Flash player is a horrible hack that is so utterly fragile and bug-ridden that Adobe can't actually make a 64-bit version without doing a full rewrite.

Re:The future?

Indeed; that was the first thing I checked upon reading this story.

I'm sorry, but I'd rather have a 6 month wait and a 64-bit version than concurrent releases. Linux has been running on AMD64 for what now? Three or four years? And now that Vista runs on 64-bit as well there's even less excuse for this. Hell, they're even got a version for the Sparc.

I don't mean to belittle the fact this story. It is pretty cool that Adobe seems to at least recognize linux as a worthwhile platform*, it's just that support is still rather lackluster.

(*While I would think that this would have to do with the increasingly common use of linux on embedded devices, the fact that there's no ARM version seems to contradict this. However, I suspect there's a (secret) version somewhere since I'm seen embedded linux devices that play flash.)

Re:The future?

Or running a 64-bit system?

Re:The future?

Us nspluginwrapper.
Actually if Firefox would support 32 bit plug ins under Linux that would also solve the issue.
Or the Distros could include 32bit Firefox be default.
Both would solve the problem. And if you need Firefox to be 64bit you are surfing the wrong sites.

Re:The future?

nspluginwrapper blows.

There's no nice way to put it. It crashes, or "loses connection" to the plugin half the time.

Re:The future?

I'm pretty sure you already do run it NAIVELY it you think that you need it to be 64 bit!

Outstanding!!!!

Now, I can watch my CPU's max out, and my systems become unresponsive on EVERY platform!

And what about the embedded version for wii/etc?

Some of us have been waiting a lot longer for flash9 and still don't have it for wii, iphone, and I believe even the Opera web browser.

This is News

Complaints about lack of Photoshop and a 64-bit version aside (it's interesting how much Slashdot resembles a sewing circle of old ladies in the complaints department), this is actually pretty significant news. Especially if this is the beginning of a new Way Things are Done for the Flash developers. With most major video sites using Flash-based players and the other wealth of Flash content on other websites, Flash support is pretty essential for desktop users. This is a major stepping stone. Hopefully Adobe will see enough rewards from doing this that will encourage them to embrace the Linux platform even more.

It was worse than that...

If I recall correctly, it was six months after the release of Flash 9 for Windows when Linux got it, but there wasn't even a Flash 8 for Linux. Linux users had actually been waiting for a new release since the release of Flash 7.

Go Home Silverlight

Competition is good and all, but this is just annoying. It only exists to muddy the waters.

I'm just waiting for MS to announce that they will no longer speak english, but will communicate only in Anglush-Sharp. A language in which every noun is copyrighted by Microsoft and only MS approved verbs will generate an intelligible response.

Re:RealPlayer?

It's [loading...] a [loading...] multimedia [loading...] player/viewer [loading...].

Re:RealPlayer?

It's a slideshow viewer.

Re:RealPlayer?

What's that?

It's just a story we tell to scare the kids.

Re:RealPlayer?

Yeah. I thought the same thing. Real represented every wrong way to market and produce a product. It was neat in the beginning (well, it was pretty much the first, as far as I know), but as time went on, it became a bloated, spyware ridden piece of garbage far inferior to all of its competitors.

Honestly, I didn't know Real was still around. I wouldn't let that software near my windows machines, much less the Linux ones.

Re:RealPlayer?

Or for anybody who listens to BBC radio, it's the only linux method supported.

Re:No deal.

umm......
GASH?
They have published the specs and the FOSS player isn't soup yet. So stop complaining and start coding buddy.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ [gnu.org]
So get to work...

Re: news is already available

Most of the 64-bit work is still in the opensource Tamarin Project. You can still contribute, if you've got the chops.
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/10/whats_so_difficult_64bit_editi.html [adobe.com]
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-relative-tamarin-joins.html [kaourantin.net]

The "we'll maintain it for you" line has not particularly been borne out by experience.... ;-)

jd/adobe

Re:YAY another binary release

I'm mainly a BSD user, but I do have a couple of Linux boxes, so I might install it on that. They do have an ARM version, right? Nope, it seems it's just x86 (not even x86-64).

Re:All platforms?

The iPhone SDK T&Cs prevent using it for writing anything that loads third-party code, which eliminates Flash as a possible thing to port (and Java, Python, whatever).