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Graphics Linux

64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha 172

Posted by Soulskill from the new-and-shiny dept.
Luchio writes "Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, 'this is a prerelease version,' so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins)."
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64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha More

64-Bit Flash Player For Linux Finally In Alpha

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  • This isn't news... (Score:5, Informative)

    by AllyGreen ( 1727388 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:06PM (#31156608)
    The 64 bit flash player has been in alpha for over a year....

    • That was my first thought, too. I've been using it for quite some time, as it's in the 'testing' repository of my distribution.

    • Re:This isn't news... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:11PM (#31156694)
      The date on the article is November 19, 2008. Even by Slashdot standards, this is ridiculously old news.

    • Re:This isn't news... (Score:5, Informative)

      by sakdoctor ( 1087155 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:23PM (#31156904) Homepage

      64-bit enthusiasts?

      x86-64 is THE de-facto architecture. Save the enthusiast label for all the retro x86 steam punk guys.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by dan325 ( 1221648 )

        64-bit enthusiasts?

        x86-64 is THE de-facto architecture. Save the enthusiast label for all the retro x86 steam punk guys.

        no kidding. I can't stand Flash. Heck, the 32-bit Linux version is barely passable. The web would be so much better off if people just used open standards for web sites. With javascript and CSS, you can do all sorts of cool stuff and it'll run perfectly on any platform -- even my PowerPC Linux box.

        How's the PowerPC Linux port of Flash coming, Adobe? right...

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rakarra ( 112805 )

          So you kicked out all your 32-bit binaries?

          Yeah, pretty much. The only 32-bit stuff on my box now is wine.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HBoar ( 1642149 )
          The 64bit version of flash for linux allows users to smoothly play standard definition video. With a good PC, you can even sometimes watch HD stuff from youtube! Pretty amazing really, I couldn't believe it when I first tried it some 4 months ago.

    • Re:This isn't news... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ZombieWomble ( 893157 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:44PM (#31157302)
      This article seems to have popped up because Adobe have indeed released an updated version of the flash player on the 11th of this month. Still alpha, but slightly newer. Pleasingly, it seems to have fixed the only persistent bug I had with the player (which caused Firefox to report a crash every time it was closed - no actual errant behaviour, however).

      Why exactly the submitter picked at year-and-a-bit old article as a reference for this news is still a mystery, however.

  • Que the Anti Adobe Activists in 3... 2...

    Wait hang on... This flash ad is causing my browser to lag...

  • Hasn't this been out for a while already?

  • That story is more than a year old!

  • I do believe I've been using this already for a year. (I'm bad with time). But I know I've been using it for some time now.

    The previous release wasn't considered an alpha?

    What comes before alpha? My greek alphabet must be really rusty.

  • Downtime is the name of the game (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Coopjust ( 872796 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:08PM (#31156636)
    Man, Flash Player locks up the CPU and crashes more often with gold releases than most alpha software. I think you'd have to be sadist to run software in alpha for Linux from Adobe.

    Seriously, I hope it leads to an improvement for the Flash Player for the platform- it's sorely needed.

    On another note, I was surprised to hear that H.264 GPU video acceleration in Flash Player 10.1, in addition to being limited to very new cards, only works on Windows, the platform with the most stable Flash Player (stable is relative).

    • Re:Downtime is the name of the game (Score:5, Interesting)

      by corychristison ( 951993 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:36PM (#31157174)

      Man, Flash Player locks up the CPU and crashes more often with gold releases than most alpha software. I think you'd have to be sadist to run software in alpha for Linux from Adobe.

      Really? Honestly I haven't ever had any real issues with Flash since I've been running the 64bit release of about a year ago.
      Even before that I had minimal issues running the 32bit version under 64bit Firefox via NSPluginWrapper.
      I'm running Gentoo Linux and it works fine. No crashing, no lagging aside from trying to run YouTube in fullscreen doesn't always work out so swell (24" LCD @ 1920x1200 resolution). I suppose that's the lack of H/W acceleration.
      I also don't have any issues using Adobe Reader. Maybe I am just lucky?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Coopjust ( 872796 )
        I wasn't aware it's over a year since the 64-bit alpha was released.

        On Fedora & Ubuntu I had a lot of issues with the 32-bit plugin, especially run using the wrapper for x64 Firefox.

        Adobe Reader is fine for me, but it's a security nightmare compared to other PDF readers.

      • Re:Downtime is the name of the game (Score:5, Funny)

        by Godji ( 957148 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @02:01PM (#31157586) Homepage
        I'm running Gentoo Linux and it works fine.

        There's your answer. We Gentoo users have a slightly distorted definition of "works fine" :D

        (Disclaimer: I kid.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Flavio ( 12072 )

        Really? Honestly I haven't ever had any real issues with Flash since I've been running the 64bit release of about a year ago.

        I also haven't had any issues with the 64-bit prerelease under Fedora 11 and 12. That said, the lack of hardware acceleration is very annoying and several years overdue.

        Adobe Reader is fine as long as I don't install the plugin. Every time I click on a PDF, it completely downloads the file and launches the Adobe Reader binary. When I used the plugin, it tried to load the file incremen

      • I also use Gentoo, and I have a different experience:
        1. Go to kongregate.com, and try a game. Usually the first time the game loads, I have a up-to-60-second complete lockup of the browser.
        2. Then their chat / kongregate API can’t connect to the server.
        3. There are tons of “Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead” errors in the .xsession-errors log, that are proven to be caused by Flash.
        4. With that new version I often get Flash apps/videos having periodic phases of extreme slowing do

    • Re:Downtime is the name of the game (Score:4, Insightful)

      by diegocg ( 1680514 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @02:09PM (#31157722)

      The Adobe Linux guys wrote a blog post explaining why Adobe Flash is so slow [adobe.com]. It seems that because Flash needs to mix the video image with other flash controls, it can't accelerate video like a typical player does. It seems that the HTML5 people have the same problem.

      "The key point here is that the decoded video frames need to be accessible by the Player which needs to do its thing before the data can be presented to the user. As of this writing, none of these drivers in Linux allow retrieval of the decoded video data. Their counterpart Windows drivers do allow this which is why this feature is supported in Windows.

      That's for Linux. What about Mac? I'm not sure but my Mac colleagues have mentioned something about Apple not making their hardware decoding APIs available to applications (if the APIs exist at all, which I'm not sure they do)"

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

        The douchebag who writes that blog can be ignored, gnash has VA-API support already.

        Adobe should just fund gnash or at least find a better linux developer for their port.

      • Last I read that thread, Mike was working really hard to only respond to the obvious trolls in the comments and just ignore any real technical discussion. I also get the distinct impression the linux "team" at adobe is basically him. That post is exactly what put me over the edge from wishy-washy on flash stuff to we-need-to-replace-this-shit-now. Adobe simply has no respect whatsoever for its linux users. Sure they provide a plugin that to this day allows developers to do a lot that is really hard to do na

        • That's pretty much my opinion of the linux team as well. Far too often on the blog there'd be something that I could easily see one person getting wrong. But which at the same time I find difficult to believe an actual group of people would all be in the dark about.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Dr.Syshalt ( 702491 )

      I develop Flex application on Linux right now, using Intellij IDEA + Flex SDK from Adobe.

      Quite complex GUI application, with numerous connected graphs, grids, sliders - one that would be just impossible to develop using AJAX or whatnot.

      Zero problems so far. Everything works properly, including Flash debugging in 32-bit SeaMonkey (there is no 64-bit debug version of Flash on neither platform, so 64 bit is for usual browsing). The app is working, I'm going to release it today or tomorrow - yes, Flash applicat

  • I just knew the strange spacetime distortion field I drove through on the way to work was going to cause issues!

    I've apparently gone a few years back in time, wait.. wha.. nooooo, I have to relive going through the recession again!

    Oh wait...

  • No performance improvement (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    From http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/faq.html

    Will application performance improve with the 64-bit Flash Player?
    A 64-bit Flash Player will not necessarily result in improved application performance. The major benefit is for Flash Player to be fully compatible with 64-bit Linux distributions so that it is both easier to install and works as expected without requiring emulation.

  • Old news, slight revision, still broken Hulu. (Score:5, Informative)

    by proxima ( 165692 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:13PM (#31156744)

    This is another revision over previous 64-bit Flash revisions. I've been using it for months, mostly without trouble.

    Around mid-January though, Hulu broke with all Linux clients running 64-bit Flash. You get "Sorry, we are unable to stream this video", and the support forum [hulu.com] is full of people reporting it. As far as I know Hulu has provided no response, and there are rumors that something related to video DRM that Hulu enabled (must be recently) is not supported in the 64-bit Flash player yet. Workarounds including using the Hulu desktop (which some report as buggy), watching at least some of the videos via Fancast (which I didn't even know existed), or using the 32-bit plugin. I just tried this 10.0.45 release and it has the same problem.

    • Re:Old news, slight revision, still broken Hulu. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by raddan ( 519638 ) * on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:38PM (#31157206)
      Actually, that's not true. Hulu mostly works fine for me in 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 and the latest Firefox. I'm running the latest Flash alpha. I can watch the videos, but the player controls are unusable (clicking on them does nothing). Fortunately, Hulu Desktop works, although the video is occasionally a little glitchy.

      Now Netflix, that's a different story. Videos are unwatchably glitchy unless I use IE, where they play fine (yes, on Windows).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 )

        Now Netflix, that's a different story. Videos are unwatchably glitchy unless I use IE, where they play fine (yes, on Windows).

        My buddy reports the same thing. He's switched back to windows (7) due to a) win7s lack of shittyness and most importantly b) he can watch netlix on his laptop

      • It's very easy to continue to use the 32-bit plugin in Ubuntu 64-bit; I believe Ubuntu still installs it (and the 64-bit wrapper) by default. Unless you specifically install the 64-bit alpha plugin and delete the others from your system (and there's a few places in which they can reside), you're probably still running 32-bit.

      • Getting and installing the 64-bit flash plugin directly from adobe and not from the repository package fixed the non clickable flash issue for me.

        Just though you might want to know. Plus there seems to be other ways [launchpad.net] to solve the problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Alef ( 605149 )

        I can watch the videos, but the player controls are unusable (clicking on them does nothing).

        I think this has got to do with GDK using "client-side windows" nowadays. Try adding "export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1" in /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer (or equivalent) to force it to use native windows.

      • Ubuntu 64 bit uses 32 bit flash :P (and it sucks, 64 bit flash works better, with the exception of Hulu of course)

    • I can use Hulu just fine on 64-bit Linux with 64-bit Flash plugin. Sometimes I get error messages that go away when I refresh the page.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TheQuantumShift ( 175338 )
      The interesting part was that I was able to watch hulu content being fed from fancast. They just redirected the video stream, didn't even bother rebranding. So to be clear:
      • All other flash video and apps seem to work fine (youtube, flash heavy sites and games).
      • Hulu's video stream works fine when viewed via another site or hulu's desktop client using the same flash plugin.
      • The only place it doesn't work is in the browser, at hulu.com.

      The only answer I come up with is that they're blacklisting linux x64 on t

  • And In Other News (Score:5, Funny)

    by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:14PM (#31156766) Journal

    Microsoft has just announced the release of Windows Vista, predicting that it will surely be the best selling operating system the Redmond, WA based company has ever released.

    • But it was. No other OS did more for the cause of not using Microsoft. (Except maybe DOS 4.0.) ^^

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by selven ( 1556643 )

      In other news, Nortel has announced another quarter of record profits. CEO John Roth foresees a bright future for the company in the years to come.

  • we will have better luck waiting for mass adoption of html5 than waiting for a REAL release of the adobe flash plugin. Maybe html5 is whats causing them to wake up

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by javilon ( 99157 )

      we will have better luck waiting for mass adoption of html5 than waiting for a REAL release of the adobe flash plugin. Maybe html5 is whats causing them to wake up

      That and Linux popping up into netbooks and phones. If they don't get their act together the only real option will be HTML5 (not that this would be a bad thing).

  • Wow, we're now taking articles from 2008 and putting them on the front page of Slashdot. We're already discovered there is nothing to see here. So please allow me an OT question here, but are there any really good Linux bloggers out there?

    Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is just one of the many writers I really don't like and so I started thinking. Are there any Linux bloggers out there I do like? I'm at a loss.

    Matt Asay is also incredibly popular, but his blog is supposedly dedicated to open source. Yet he spends

    • In the open source world, you are encouraged to get up off your butt and do something when you see a problem that is not being properly addressed. Blogging tools are easily available all over the place. If you don't like the Linux bloggers you have been reading, start your own blog and promote it.

      You might also want to subscribe to any one of the hundreds of open source podcasts out there. I listen to FLOSS Weekly (Randal Schwarz + Leo LaPorte and sometimes Jono Bacon), Fresh Ubuntu (Peter Nicholitis and

  • Flash for the 64bit DEC Alpha !! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @01:24PM (#31156940)

    Finally,

    Though wouldn't a PPC Linux binary be more useful?

  • So that finally Kongregate will support it. :/

  • Seriously. 64-Bit Linux has been around for a long time. Why is it so hard for Adobe to create a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux?

  • because it's easy to block it and get rid of 80% of obnoxious ads. With HTML5 coming up, i'm dreading having no choice but christmas-tree websites all over.

  • yeah, its not perfect and doesn't work for every flash file. But, it does work for the flash I do want to see. Plus, stopping the annoying flash file is pretty simple. Its just a right click away.
  • I've had adobe's 64bit linux plugin forever, both in FF and Chrome. The only thing new may be the subversion (instead of 10.1.2.3 or whatever I've been on, now they are on 10.1.2.3b?)
  • I'm kind of astonished to see so many people here running the flash plugin without a problem. Unless the definition of 'without a problem' changed somewhere.
    I run it in Ubuntu (karmic, 64-bit) and it sure is the worst piece of shitware I got. Whenever I have a page with flash plugin, cpu stays fixed at 100% usage (well, at 25%, because luckily I'm on a quad-core). Also, the plugin segfaults more than my tests when I was learning assembly. After a few days turned on, last lines of my dmesg are always someth
    • Nope, npviewer.bin crashes all the time on me too, and the flash 10 for 64 bit only really supports "some" of the features of flash. Lots of flash _including_ sites work ok, but when they're _really_ heavy flash, or use a lot of recent flash features, it pretty much kills the site, with sections missing, needing to reload the page two or three times to get it to display, and having sections of the page randomly dissapear as one flash bit that isn't supported yet crashes _all_ flash in _all_ tabs. And I've

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rakarra ( 112805 )

      Nope, happens to me all the time. Even just with Youtube, the premiere Flash site on the 'net.

  • Would somebody like to give a convincing reason for running 64 bit browser and extensions rather than the 32 bit versions? I can't work out why one would want to do so.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JustNiz ( 692889 )

      Uhh.. to take full advantage of your hardware rather than shoot it in the foot?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by heffrey ( 229704 )

        On x64 32 bit apps do take full advantage of hardware so long as they don't need more than 4GB memory. Or am I missing something?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by JustNiz ( 692889 )

          Thats a very common misconception. There is much more to 64 bit extensions than just a larger address space.
          32 bit apps can't use any of the 64 bit instructions or take advantage of the extra cpu registers introduced for 64 bit such as extra SSE registers, or do instruction pointer relative data access, or have the same mathematical precision in a single math operation. All this means 32 bit code is less cpu-efficient.

          Basically, native 64 bit code runs faster. The only question is whether that difference is

  • I can start using the 64 bit Linux Flash plugin that I've been using for over a year now...

    (not that I really blame the editors that much - Adobe haven't exactly gone out of their way to advertise it)

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