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Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux
Adobe has released an alpha version of a 64-bit Flash player 10 for Linux, ahead of either Windows or OS X versions. Users of 64-bit systems have had to deal with various workarounds for Flash support, so this is welcome news for some. More info can be found in the FAQ. (Thanks to Adam Gundy.)
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Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 17:33 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] While I fully expected Adobe to release a 64-bit Flash plugin eventually, I thought it was April Fools' day when I read that they're putting the Linux release at the head of the line. Of course, this might be so that they can have more time to whittle down the bugs on Linux--I'm thinking of their past troubles with porting Flash to Linux. We'll see...
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 19:05 UTC (Mon) by wmf (guest, #33791) [Link]
AFAIK, Linux is the only platform that is shipping 64-bit Web browsers.
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 19:13 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Um, Microsoft released a 64-bit Internet Explorer. I'm pretty sure that this is installed with x64 XP SP3 (and likely Vista). However, Windows defaults to the 32-bit version on the Desktop and Start Menu, if I remember correctly.
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 19:16 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]
Which essentially means that nobody uses the 64-bit Explorer and that putting engineering effort into supporting it is not particularly useful.
The only reason they're supporting 64-bit Linux is because there's enough of us saying that we actually want it, because almost everyone with a 64-bit Linux desktop is using a 64-bit browser.
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 19:15 UTC (Mon) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]
Actually, I think Microsoft ships a 64-bit version of IE with Vista-64 that no one uses because of the lack of 64-bit 3rd party extensions.
so we're a beta for Windows-64 Posted Nov 17, 2008 19:47 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I'm sure that this is Adobe's real purpose: the Linux folks can help them get their bugs out, but the real reason is Windows.
so we're a beta for Windows-64 Posted Nov 17, 2008 22:05 UTC (Mon) by adamgundy (subscriber, #5418) [Link] I was thinking it was more likely to do with Apple's upcoming Snow Leopard release, which is supposed to be all 64 bit..
so we're a beta for Windows-64 Posted Nov 18, 2008 4:34 UTC (Tue) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]
Either way, the fact is that Linux provides a much more mature and useful 64-bit development environment than either Windows or Mac. It's the best place to start this project, and that's a credit to open source.
so we're a beta for Windows-64 Posted Nov 18, 2008 15:14 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
And the testers are more mature too :-)
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 17:34 UTC (Mon) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]
Adobe loves Linux =)
Now only porting every Adobe app to Qt is left to make me a happy camper ;)
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 17:53 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
Just as Gnash has become capable of doing everything that I need. I guess this binary dump might be helpful to someone, somewhere, though.
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 22:08 UTC (Mon) by jorism (subscriber, #21807) [Link]
Hm, here gnash crashes all the time, taking the browser down as well... Hopefully the newer gnash versions are more stable (I am using the version in Debian testing, maybe the one in "unstable" is actually more stable).
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 22:21 UTC (Mon) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]
I've tried Gnash a couple of times, and in my experience it crashes frequently enough to be useless. Swfdec is more stable - but it's also slow, and generally has trouble with anything other than the most popular flash apps. Which essentially leaves Adobe's plugin as the only real choice for now...
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 17, 2008 23:25 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
I used to use swfdec. But Gnash seems to have passed it up now. I'm running 0.8.4 under Ubuntu x86_64 with no problems at all.
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 19, 2008 16:10 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
Perhaps they could get some of the flash advert companies to contribute to the projects a bit?
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 18, 2008 3:13 UTC (Tue) by kev009 (subscriber, #43906) [Link]
If nspluginwrapper wasn't around, I would probably be giddy with joy right now, but I see this as simply an incremental improvement: it is still a BLOB.
I still recommend using nspluginwrapper to do native-native plugin hosting. This will keep a plugin crash from bringing down the browser, and a simple refresh will get the plugin going again.
<random thought>Mozilla should merge nspluginwrapper and use this as above to feature parity Chrome.
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 18, 2008 15:16 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] Upside: as you say, plugin crash doesn't bring down browser. Downside: with nspluginwrapper, the plugin crashes a lot. I was seriously considering installing a 32-bit browser (and associated environment) but now Adobe has made that unnecessary. It's working nicely so far.
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash player alpha for Linux Posted Nov 19, 2008 9:29 UTC (Wed) by Tuxie (guest, #47191) [Link]
After years of struggling with nspluginwrapper I finally gave up and yet again resorted to creating a 32-bit chroot and running Firefox from that. nspluginwrapper (including the latest version, 1.1.4) still make flashplayer crash way too often and it's ugly because it puts a gray box where the flash applet is supposed to be for a second or so until the player has started.
Using 32-bit software in an otherwise 64-bit environment introduce other problems (must keep widget themes, fonts, NVidia GL-libs, alsa-plugins etc in sync) and it takes quite a bit longer to start up and it use more RAM, but at least it makes flash stable so it's worth it.
I'm really looking forward to being able to "rm -rf linux32" thanks to this!
If only Sun would release a 64bit Java... Posted Nov 18, 2008 3:34 UTC (Tue) by knobunc (subscriber, #4678) [Link]
Or if only I could get the Icedtea stuff to compile...
-ben
If only Sun would release a 64bit Java... Posted Nov 18, 2008 5:07 UTC (Tue) by euvitudo (guest, #98) [Link]
I've been using 64-bit Java for quite some time. Maybe you meant a 64-bit Java browser plugin? (Though there is a 64-bit appletviewer, if you really have to run applets.)
If only Sun would release a 64bit Java... Posted Nov 18, 2008 19:11 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
The Ubuntu Intrepid package works fine for me (though fewer and fewer sites seem to use java, so I haven't tested it all that heavily). Between that and 64-bit flash, I don't need either a 32-bit browser or nspluginwrapper anymore...
If only Sun would release a 64bit Java... Posted Nov 19, 2008 0:10 UTC (Wed) by donio (subscriber, #94) [Link]
supposedly sun-jdk 6u12 will come with a 64 bit plugin
nspluginwrapper still important Posted Nov 18, 2008 4:39 UTC (Tue) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link]
nspluginwrapper development is still important. This is because nspluginwrapper runs plugs in a separate process, enabling the browser to survive inevitable plugin bugs, and also the possibility of additional security through security policy isolation of that separate process. Fedora 8+ has run all plugins, even native 32bit-on-32bit, wrapped in nspluginwrapper for this purpose.
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/nspluginwrapper-d...
http://macromedia.mplug.org/
Has anybody actually installed it on amd64? Posted Nov 18, 2008 6:33 UTC (Tue) by dkarpo (guest, #36965) [Link]
Attempts to install this on amd64 failed out of the box.
The Debian package is configured as 'i386' and won't install on anything else by default. Alternatively, the installer in the .tar.gz looks for i[3456]86 and won't install on x86_64.
It looks like in both cases the libflashplayer.so is linked against the 32-bit libraries (lib32) so how 64-bit is this plugin really? Perhaps I've downloaded the incorrect packages off Adobe's site.
Has anybody actually installed it on amd64? Posted Nov 18, 2008 6:56 UTC (Tue) by dkarpo (guest, #36965) [Link]
Disregard. I obviously downloaded the wrong package. I pulled the standard 32-bit from their site instead of the 64-bit version from Adobe labs. :)
Derrick
Short review. Posted Nov 20, 2008 20:23 UTC (Thu) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link]
Wow, this is SO much better than the old 32 bit version on my FC9 x86_64 laptop. While the 32 bit version had a tendency to stutter when loading videos, the 64 bit version has been quite steady. It is also significantly faster. I tried out a few online flash games and have found them to be much better with this plugin. In addition, it looks like it is now working with Pulseaudio properly. Not only can I load up multiple animations at once without it hanging, I can also have VLC streaming CBC radio at the same time. At this point it seems good enough that I will be switching all our 64 bit systems to this plugin over the old 32 bit plugin.
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