The idea for this came from a discussion with Paul Sladen at a recent meeting of Hampshire Linux User Group. A collegue of mine has recently installed Linux and has a website which uses a flash based gallery system. Unfortunately the gallery requires a modern version of the Flash player from Adobe (formerly Macromedia). I showed him this procedure and whilst it’s not perfect, it’s a good short term (hah!) measure to enable Linux users to use Flash 8 and 9 based sites until Adobe make a newer version of Flash available natively for Linux. Don’t hold your breath for that though, they have one guy working on the Linux port. Nice one Adobe.
Edit: Apparently they have more than one guy working on it. My mistake.
Ok, so the problem is this. Adobe don’t have an up to date port of Flash player for Linux. Now I’m not going to get into a debate about the rights and wrongs of Flash. I’m aware that some people hate Flash with a passion, and with good reason. My motivation here is that there are sites out there which (for some reason) require newer versions of Flash player in order to function at all. Take for example the website of the popular 80s electronic beat combo and quiet couple the Pet Shop Boys. If you visit their site you’ll be told you need Flash player 8 or above. Adobe have only released version 7 for Linux, and 8 for Windows. So if stripey brightly-coloured moody-band websites are your want and you run Linux then you’re bang out of luck.
In a nutshell this solution involves running the Windows version of Firefox web browser on Linux under WINE. When prompted for the Flash player, we simply install the Windows version of the Flash player under WINE too. That way we can view websites that require Flash in Mozilla Firefox under WINE. Pretty simple really. Not ideal of course, but it does work, and for those people who need new versions of Flash it’s really the only way right now under Linux.
So here’s what we do. This procedure assumes you’ve already installed WINE on your Linux distro of choice. This is of course going to differ. For me, under Ubuntu I used the Synaptic package manager (a lie, I use apt-get on the command line) to install the WINE package. There is a guide to installing WINE on Ubuntu. I guess there must be for other distros too. Can’t help you there though.
Visit the Mozilla website using the browser you already have installed.
Click the Other systems and languages link.
Look down the Windows headed column and click the version for your language. This will take you to the download page. Your browser may ask you where to store the download.
You’ll note that mine stores downloads in my “Desktop” directory which under Ubuntu Linux is actually a folder in your home directory called “Desktop”.
This means the install kit will appear as an icon on your desktop. Of course you can save it anywhere you like, but that’ll do for me.
Now if you have WINE installed correctly you should be able to right click the .exe file and then choose ‘Open with “Wine Windows Emulator”‘. (Unfortunately I couldn’t screenshot that because the menu disappears when take the picture). Once clicked the Firefox for Windows installer starts.
Usual stuff, follow the on screen prompts.
Yay! Installed.
So here we are running Firefox for Windows under WINE.
Lets go and visit a page that we know uses flash. How about Jons favourite site, the Pet Shop Boys home page. Note the message that we don’t have the right version of Flash. That’s to be expected as this is a plain vanilla install of Firefox so far, which doesn’t come with Flash player.
Just click the link to “Click here to download the flash player”. Alternatively go directly to Adobe’s download page. Make sure you go there in the Windows version of Firefox. That way it will detect Firefox on Windows and take you to the right version of Flash to download.
Click the “Download Now” button.
Save the Flash installer somewhere. I saved it on my desktop again.
Ok, finished downloading. I just clicked “Open” in the Firefox download manager, but equally you could right click the Flash installer program and run it in WINE as we did for Firefox installer earlier.
Click through the usual warning about downloading executables, then follow the normal prompts in the installer.
Once it’s all installed we can re-visit the Flash based website we tried to view earlier.
This particular example uses the special disgusting blend of Flash and popups. So we have to enable the popup to see the site.
Yay! The site loads and Flash works. Easy.
Now to tidy up a little. The desktop still has the Firefox and Flash installers.
Get rid of them, and we’re left with a lovely Firefox icon which when clicked opens Firefox for Windows under WINE. Job done.
3 Comments
scrot has a nice delay argument, which allows you to take screenshots of things like menus that disappear when an other application takes focus. So scrot -d 5 gives you a five second delay.
They have more than one dev working on it. It’s blogging the effort they have only one guy on.
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/06/resources.html:
Some commenters have expressed dismay that Adobe has apparently allocated so few resources to the Linux Flash Player effort, namely, just me. I just wanted to assure you all that there are more people officially allocated to the Linux effort in various capacities. I was just chosen to present this blog since I have the most experience, ah, facilitating communication with Linux end users.
For the clarification. I’ve edited to make that clear.