Results tagged “Adobe Flash” from CLICK

It's been so long since I built a Debian Etch box, I had to find my own entry on Debian's decision to take the Flash Player Nonfree plugin out of Etch and restrict it to Debian Backports.

Besides Flash being a closed-source program, it's also a huge security risk (the executable nature of Flash data being a "vector" of entry to your system, if I have it right), I'm not surprised that the Debian project decided to do this. Developers don't like to "maintain" code they can't even see.

If you do want Flash (and many of us do need it, even if we don't always want it), there is a page on the Debian Wiki about how to use Backports solely for the purposes of installing the Flash player. That's if you don't use a lot of Backports (and I don't use any) and don't want to use that repository for anything other than Flash.

As I say in my previous entry, back when the Flash player was in the Debian Etch repositories, I could never get it to work, and instead I either used the .deb package from Adobe or compiled it from a .tar.gz file. Either one is easy to do. But that package isn't updated when you do an overall software update of your Linux system (if you're using a package manager like apt/Aptitude/Synaptic or RPM/Yum).

If you do want to get your Flash player directly from Adobe, besides the .tar.gz and the .deb package (which for some reason is recommended for "Ubuntu 8.04+" rather than all Debian-based architectures, there is an additional "APT package" specifically for "Ubuntu 8.04+." There are also RPM and Yum packages.

Of course, all of these are for i386 only.

If you have a PowerPC-based computer, you can use the Flash players that Adobe develops for OS 9 and OS X, but not for any of the Linux OSes that run on PowerPC (such as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu 6.06, Yellow Dog) or even any BSD operating systems (where if you are running i386 you can generally use a Linux browser and Flash player, since Linux executables generally run on these OSes).

Yep, Adobe continues to develop Flash for PowerPC on OS 9, but it won't do it for PowerPC Linux and probably never will.

So my Power Mac G4/466 runs Debian Etch very well, but it won't display Flash content because the sole entity — Adobe — that controls this pervasive technology doesn't care to port it to anything but i386 for Linux.

That's why such closed-source, proprietary technologies can really fail a great many of us. I don't begin to know what the situation is for .mp3 audio, which isn't a free, open-source technology, but I can't think of a system that won't play .mp3 audio.

Especially when it comes to the ways we store, play and display content, being open is way better than the alternative. Can you imagine what would happen if HTML itself (or CSS, or even programming languages like C and Python) were proprietary technologies? We'd be in deep trouble, and there would be much less innovation and access to content than we currently enjoy.

Open-source audio technologies such as Ogg aren't used all that much, and they should be used more. Development is ongoing on Gnash, an open-source Flash alternative, and if it ever works, I'll be extremely grateful for it.

I don't claim to know exactly what Adobe AIR is all about, and from what I can tell, it's not ported to Linux yet, but it does promise that developers can use standard text editors and a freely distributed runtime (as free as the Flash player is, I imagine) to run whatever widgets/applications are created with it.

Not needing expensive proprietary tools to create software is a very good thing. But having the whole process, from coding to compiling, be free and open-source is another thing. And it is a way better one, too.

Disclaimer: I do use quite a bit of proprietary software, even in open-source operating systems.

There's a lot of work I have to do in Windows XP and in Mac's OS X.

I also run the Flash player on many of my Linux and OpenBSD installs.

I use the Opera Web browser, which is generally available in Linux and FreeBSD and OpenBSD (via the aforementioned Linux compatibility layer) because it enables me to do a few very critical tasks that are "restricted" to IE but which for some reason are doable in Opera. Opera is free but not open-source. It also is an excellent application.

The biggest problem I see right now with Linux is the lack of a stable video-editing solution that allows independent editing of audio and video (something that Kino can't do, if I understand the situation correctly). I mean an application that, like Kino, is part of the repositories of the major Linux and BSD distributions/projects and is not in perpetual beta.

(Disclaimers end here; sorry about all the ranting).