HowTo: Gnash 0.8.5 in Debian Lenny

[acimmarusti]

Thanks for clarifying this.

I also have the issue that only a large set of youtube videos work....but when I try, say, espn, hulu, etc, I get nothing...
Is there some sort of list of websites that work ?

Thanks

[craigevil]

Thanks for clarifying this.

I also have the issue that only a large set of youtube videos work....but when I try, say, espn, hulu, etc, I get nothing...
Is there some sort of list of websites that work ?

Thanks

That is because most sites require flash 10 or flash 9.

Gnash supports the majority of Flash opcodes up to SWF version 7, and a wide sampling of ActionScript 2 classes for SWF version 8.5. SWF
version 9 and ActionScript 3 support is being worked on.

As fast as Adobe Flash changes Gnash is never going to catch up.

[acimmarusti]

I'm quite pleased with gnash for the moment, but I was getting annoyed by how slow some, flash heavy, websites run. So I found this cool addon for iceweasel/firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433/

It blocks all flash content by default and plays it at your will. This makes browsing flash heavy websites a lot easier. I've been testing it on two computers: one old pentium4 laptop 32-bit using the proprietary flash plugin and on my 64-bit laptop using gnash. It works great on both, but I have an annoying issue with the 64-bit laptop:

After browsing flash sites, if I want to shutdown my computer I get an annoying message saying that a process firefox-bin is not responding...this causes the shutdown time to increase dramatically. Upon running top I found no active firefox-bin process!...I went to Applications > System Tools > System Monitor and I finally found the culprit....a "sleeping" xulrunner-stub process. After killing it I was able to shutdown properly.

Anyone has this problem when using gnash + flashblock firefox addon ? I'll try to find more about it and post it back.

[acimmarusti]

I just realized this addon is in the debian repositories. I tried it from there and now I don't have any problems!

[Soul Singin']

I just installed Gnash 0.8.8 on Debian Lenny. To do it, I first installed libltdl7 (version: 2.2.6b-2~bpo50+1) from Backports, then I added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list file:

Code: Select all

deb http://www.getgnash.org/debs/debian lenny main

and ran:

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apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade && apt-get clean

I think that repository is usually used for development snapshots however, so be careful of what you install from that repository and do not keep that repository in your sources list if you want to retain a stable version of Gnash.

Finally, a word from our sponsor:

Why Debian Users Think Gnash Sucks

After reading yet another blog post from a Debian user about why Gnash sucks, I need to rant. The problem is very simple, Debian has been shipping an ancient release of Gnash that was so old, very little worked with it anymore. This was due to several factors, but the end result was nobody was happy. I tried to work around this problem by building frequent snapshots as deb packages for Lenny on x86, amd64, and mipsel, which one can get from our own Gnash Debian repository

But most people never knew about this repository, so after a few seconds of staring at a blank window, they'd quickly drop Gnash and install the Adobe plugin. So much for being supporters of free software...

So after the efforts of several people over several months, the problems that kept Gnash from being updated have been fixed. Gnash is also available in Debian backports, and when the next release of 0.8.8 comes out in the next few days, it should be included. Many thanks to the volunteers that made this possible.

By rob at 2010-08-20 21:32 | rob's blog

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