Linux Now an Equal Flash Player 437
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.
64-Bit support? (Score:1, Interesting)
The stability of wrappers just isn't there yet (neither is the performance). One would think by now they could do a recompile...
Equal? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is News (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No 64-bit (Score:5, Interesting)
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:And what about the embedded version for wii/etc (Score:3, Interesting)
Some more equal than others... (Score:5, Interesting)
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].
Re: news is already available (Score:5, Interesting)
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
FP 9 for Wii (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyone know when Flashplayer 9 for the wii is coming out? Or how to use Flashplayer 9 with wii homebrew?
Re:The future? (Score:1, Interesting)
Or the Distros could include 32bit Firefox be default...And if you need Firefox to be 64bit you are surfing the wrong sites
Allow me to introduce you to this thing called shared libraries. Unless you want the distros to either include a statically linked 32bit Firefox or to include a large amount of 32bit libraries with it, that's not an ideal solution.
>4gb of ram isn't unreasonable these days anymore and if you're going to run a 64bit system, you'd like every application to be 64bit in order to save hd space so as to not have two copies of every library (the 32bit and 64bit versions).
It still obscures drop down menus (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The future? (Score:3, Interesting)
The downside is that in 64-bit mode, pointers are all twice as big, which means your program will need more memory and possibly memory bandwidth than the 32-bit version would. My experience is that 64-bit is usually slower, unless you have 4GB or more of RAM. Theoretically, 64-bit can be faster, but generally people don't switch because they need the faster CPU speed, they switch because they need the RAM.
Exactly. Even if every application had a 64-bit compatible version out there, I wouldn't bother switching unless I really needed the extra addressable memory. Addressable memory is really the key, though--you can still see the benefits of 64-bit without having 4GB of physical RAM.
But the guy you replied to really seems to not have much of a clue. There's certainly not going to be a noticeable performance difference between a 32-bit version of Flash and a 64-bit version of Flash on the same machine. The historic problem with the lack of a 64-bit version was that you simply couldn't run Flash on that machine without setting up a 32-bit environment as well. It wasn't a particularly hard task, but it's annoying, it means keeping up with multiple versions of Firefox, and it was quite a hassle. Now with the plugin wrapper, it's trivial, and I can't think of a single reason that Adobe should bother with a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux.
Now do the same for Shockwave Player (Score:5, Interesting)
Now do the same for Shockwave Player so it can be on linux as well.
Time line for flash on iphone?
Re:No 64-bit (Score:3, Interesting)
Why couldn't you just quote it like this:
--penguin.swf [adobe.com] (Penguin.SWF tracks development status and issues regarding the Linux version of Adobe's Flash Player)
Re: news is already available (Score:2, Interesting)
I just browsed the Tamarin mailing list, status reports, and commit logs. Adobe employees seem to do at least half of the work, but that's less than all of the work you'd do if you hadn't donated the code.
Re:YAY another binary release (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah. They have been lacking in that area for a while now.
Maybe, if the OP's speculation is true, we should try to manipulate M$ to do a Silverlight 64bit and Adobe would rush to beat them.
Re:The future? (Score:3, Interesting)
64-bit programs are not intrinsically slower than their 32-bit varieties. A large part of this is compiler maturity. x86 has been around for a long time. x86-64 (via AMD64 and EM-64T) is still relatively new and in a state of evolution that GCC is currently attempting to fully-optimize code that does not explicitly take advantage of the fact that it indeed has twice as many INTEGER registers to play with.
MMX, SSE, and 3DNow! add 128-bit capability, yes, but not as general purpose registers which is why their importance has largely been realized in the mathematical arena versus strictly mundane code.
Re:Some more equal than others... (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed.
ERROR: Your architecture, \'x86_64\', is not supported by the Adobe Flash Player installer.