Flash 8 / 9 for Linux?

Report · May 24, 2006

Isn't it about time Flash 8 and 9 binaries are released for Linux? Only Flash 7 is available for Linux as i386 and this is not good when more and more websites require at least Flash 8, and now some even require 9 already. Additionally, if Adobe wants to keeps it's user base, they should also consider releasing PowerPC and AMD64 builds of Flash 8/9 for Linux, not just an i386 build. I know many people here at school who run Ubuntu Linux and Fedora Core on AMD64 and PowerPC machines. Many of them are web developers themselves with a passion for Open Source software development. We have all been talking more and more about Flash being an issue if Adobe is not making it available for all platforms and architectures in wide use today. We have even talked about creating a replacement (OpenSWF), but that's a waste of our time if Adobe would just release a official binary.

So, finally, where's the support? When will we see Flash 8 and Flash 9 binaries for Linux?

Report · May 24, 2006

Here we go again .. another Linux person complaining and not checking what's
going on

Macromedia (and now Adobe) have already stated that porting to Linux / 64Bit
will be part of Flash Player 9. They skipped the (large) porting job for
Flash player 8 so that they could get Flash Player 9 out sooner for
everyone.
--
Jeckyl

Report · May 24, 2006

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
Macromedia (and now Adobe) have already stated that porting to Linux / 64Bit
will be part of Flash Player 9. They skipped the (large) porting job for
Flash player 8 so that they could get Flash Player 9 out sooner for
everyone.

OK, AMD64 Linux builds -- good. But what about PowerPC builds for Linux? I see no mention of that anywhere. Am I wrong? Is there any plan of PPC builds for Linux?

Additionally, this is a major problem with closed source software in general -- you *MUST* depend on the vendor. And if the vendor decides it is not profitable to produce binaries for your OS/arch type, then you get pushed out of the user base. With open source packages, if I really really wanted support I could write it myself or hire a bunch of people to code up a robust solution based on existing infrastructure. Who's to say Adobe won't sell their Flash technology to Microsoft in the future for X millions of dollars, and Microsoft decides to kill the Linux builds? It would be in Adobe interest to sell if it is a good deal for them, and it would be in Microsoft's interest to kill the Linux builds. At that point, us Linux users get screwed. Not cool at all.

So, to ask again, is a Linux PPC (Mac) build planned for Flash Player 9? If not, that's a problem for existing PowerPC Linux users...

Report · May 24, 2006

> OK, AMD64 Linux builds -- good. But what about PowerPC builds for Linux?

Linus AND 64-Bit .. whether or not its for a particlar flavour of linux and
particular processor is up to their internal guys to work out.

> Additionally, this is a major problem with closed source software in
> general
> -- you *MUST* depend on the vendor. And if the vendor decides it is not
> profitable to produce binaries for your OS/arch type, then you get pushed
> out
> of the user base.

Yeup . .thats the problem when you decide to use an operating system like
Linux.

If you choose to use a minority platform like Linux, where the norm is for
free software, and then expect commercial companies to support it you're
going to be out of luck. If you want the commercial software, use a
"commerical" platform like Windows. Otherwise, choose technology that you
get get for free .. but sometimes you do need to pay for good software
(programmers need to be paid too).

> So, to ask again, is a Linux PPC (Mac) build planned for Flash Player 9?
> If
> not, that's a problem for existing PowerPC Linux users...

They've said they will be porting to Linux and 64-bit platforms .. you'll
have to see what comes out of it. Maybe see if you can get onto beta
program?
--
Jeckyl

Report · May 25, 2006

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
Linus AND 64-Bit .. whether or not its for a particlar flavour of linux and
particular processor is up to their internal guys to work out.

You have a misunderstanding of the fundamentals. Adobe / Macromedia have the source code. If they don't release a PowerPC build, then it doesn't matter -- you won't be able to run Flash on a PowerPC processor. It has nothing to do with the Linux distribution, or "flavor" as you call it.

A quick guide for those who don't understand source to binary conversion -- a compiler takes the source code and compiles it to run, in binary form, for a particular CPU (and OS). Windows generally uses the Intel/AMD-based 32-bit processor type generalized to "i386". Now some newer computers have AMD64 CPU's, which is just an extension of the 32-bit acrhitecture. If you really want to take advantage of a 64-bit CPU, you would want a 64-bit compiled binary for your OS. However, PowerPC is generally used by the Macintosh. DId you even know you could run Linux on your iMac or iBook? Some people have no idea, and I don't fault you for not thinking of this. I have friends that dual-boot Linux and OS X on their laptops. However, they can't go to any Flash-based websites in Linux, because there is no PowerPC build for Linux made available from Adobe. That's the problem. Will it be fixed? Well, we hope so. The PowerPC build for OS X works just fine.

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
Yeup . .thats the problem when you decide to use an operating system like
Linux.

If you choose to use a minority platform like Linux, where the norm is for
free software, and then expect commercial companies to support it you're
going to be out of luck. If you want the commercial software, use a
"commerical" platform like Windows. Otherwise, choose technology that you
get get for free .. but sometimes you do need to pay for good software
(programmers need to be paid too).

Are you saying Linux does not have commercial distributions? I can guarantee for you that Adobe even purchases commercial versions of Linux themselves! They own Red Hat licenses!

I understand that programmers should be paid in some way for their work, and I am a programmer myself. However, if you already have the source code, it shouldn't take much hacking to get the code to build on PowerPC for Linux, especially if you already have it built on Linux in some form and you have a PowerPC build working for another OS. The exception to this, of course, is when the software is poorly designed and this causes a problem for porting. With all their billions, Adobe should be able to crank out a PowerPC build of Flash for Linux. Heck, give me the source code and some documentation and I'll get it done by myself in a few months if I get frustrated enough.

I'm sorry to tell you, but the Linux and Open Source market share is growing every year and now is growing exponentially over the past two years. Check for yourself. The switch that people have made from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox is just a microcosm of the bigger change that we will likely see over the next 5-10 years. Linux is growing, and it is very quickly catching up to the size of the Mac user base, which is at around 5%.

About software for free. I have never paid for Flash Player. If you have, you got ripped off. I'm only asking for a PowerPC build, which is the equivalent of ticking a few flags in the compiler options and testing it -- as long as architecture concerns were originally planned for in the underlying software design. I have doubts that Adobe made their code very portable, and that is why they are seeing many issues today. The time investment in "cleaning it up", is not worth their time for the small market that will be using it. However, why not do some type of shared source agreement where they license the code to Universities and the students port the software to work in their spare time for fun? Students have tons of free time to tinker around, and in fact, that's how Linux was created. Just a bunch of free time on one man's hands -- and look where it got us. The power of Linux has been utilized by every major corporation in the world -- even Microsoft and Adobe.

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
They've said they will be porting to Linux and 64-bit platforms .. you'll
have to see what comes out of it. Maybe see if you can get onto beta
program?

Linux i386 builds are already available, so that's not an issue. 64-bit is still an issue. I'll be a beta tester for Linux builds -- where do I sign up?

And finally, my question still has not been answered; where is the PowerPC build for Linux?

Report · May 25, 2006

> You have a misunderstanding of the fundamentals.

Not at all

> Adobe / Macromedia have the source code.

Yes .. of course they do .. it theirs

> If they don't release a PowerPC build, then it doesn't matter --
> you won't be able to run Flash on a PowerPC processor.

What doesn't matter? Are you saying it doesn't matter whewther or not there
is a PowerPC build of the player? If so, whyare you askign for it?

> It has nothing to do with the Linux distribution, or "flavor"
> as you call it.

Of course it does .. if they don't port it for a particular combiniation of
processor and hardware and operating system, then it has EVERYTHING to do
with it. You seem to be contradicting yourself.

[snip the lesson on copilers that I have no need of at all]

> because there is no PowerPC build for Linux made available
> from Adobe. That's the problem. Will it be fixed? Well, we hope so.
> The
> PowerPC build for OS X works just fine.

You just didn't listen did you? They are porting the source code to these
other platforms and operating systems as part of the Flash Player 9 (if we
believe them). They deliberately did NOT do the port of the source for
Flash Palyer 8 as it would have delayed the developement of Flash Player 9.

> Are you saying Linux does not have commercial distributions?

No .. I'm saying that it is a platform who's users have an expectation of
free (or inexpensive) software. It is also a relatively very small market.
That makes it very unattractive for large software vendors, and as such you
get limited availablilty of commercial software for Linux. That limited
availability is something one should take into account when chosing to use
Linux over Windows.

> However, if you already have the source code, it
> shouldn't take much hacking to get the code to build on
> PowerPC for Linux,

You don't know the complexities of the optimised source for the Flash
Player. You could probably port an unoptimised version that would crawl
along, but MM don't want to have something like that out there.

> The exception to this, of course, is when the software
> is poorly designed and this causes a problem for porting.

That's partly true as well, mostly because the software has been hacked and
expanded since the original future splash (some of that source code is still
in there). Regardless of the reasons, the port is non trivial.

> With all their billions, Adobe should be able to crank out a PowerPC build
> of
> Flash for Linux. Heck, give me the source code and some documentation and
> I'll
> get it done by myself in a few months if I get frustrated enough.

I'm sure they'd love for you to do that .. put it won't be easy. Plaase
read this info by MM developers:

http://www.kaourantin.net/2005/08/porting-flash-player-to-alternative.html

> I'm sorry to tell you, but the Linux and Open Source market share is
> growing

No need to be sorry .. and that may well mean Linux will become a platform
worth supporting for more commercaill software makers. That is a good
thing. I'm not anti-Linux .. just a realist.

> About software for free. I have never paid for Flash Player.

Yeup .. they don't get direct revenue from it. But they do ahve to take
developers away from their product likst Flash that DO generate revenue.
There are valid and compelling reasons why there is not yet a port for Flash
Player 8 but sahould be one (eventually) for Flash Player 9.

> I'm only asking for a PowerPC build, which is the
> equivalent of ticking a few flags in the compiler options and testing it

No .. its a LOT more than that. Read the article above. If it were
trivial, they would have done it already.

> I have doubts that Adobe made their code very portable, and
> that is why they are seeing many issues today. The time investment in
> "cleaning it up", is not worth their time for the small market that will
> be
> using it.

You've hit the nail on the head (or at least one of them) But that doesn't
alter the fact that the Flash Player soure is not at all easy to port.
Unless you have a time-machine handy to go back into the past to tell the
developers to write their code with future porting in mind.

> However, why not do some type of shared source agreement where they
> license the code to Universities and the students port the software to
> work in
> their spare time for fun? Students have tons of free time to tinker
> around,
> and in fact, that's how Linux was created.

You can apply for a license for the source code of the player to develop for
other platforms.

The danger with making it fully open is that eery tom dick and harry could
take the player in different directions and introbude differnet bugs and
extensions and limitations .. it would likely end up that SWF would not be
the 'universal' format that make it successful.

> Linux i386 builds are already available, so that's not an issue. 64-bit
> is
> still an issue. I'll be a beta tester for Linux builds -- where do I sign
> up?

Try the Adboe web site

> And finally, my question still has not been answered; where is the PowerPC
> build for Linux?

Its like a little kid in the back of the car 'Are we there yet?' It will be
there when its done. There are additional issues when porting to 64Bit
--
Jeckyl

Report · May 25, 2006

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
What doesn't matter? Are you saying it doesn't matter whewther or not there
is a PowerPC build of the player? If so, whyare you askign for it?

When I said "it doesn't matter", I meant that there's nothing that can be done by the Linux distributors of a PowerPC Linux version unless Adobe actually releases a PowerPC build! You can't take an i386 binary and install it on a PowerPC architecture dude, cmon!!! Wake up!! You know what I meant...

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
Of course it does .. if they don't port it for a particular combiniation of
processor and hardware and operating system, then it has EVERYTHING to do
with it. You seem to be contradicting yourself.

"They" == Adobe in this case. As above, nothing can be done by the Linux distributors ("they") until a PowerPC build for Linux is available directly...

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
[snip the lesson on copilers that I have no need of at all]

Well, obviously you don't understand that you can't run an i386 build of Flash Player for Linux on yer iBook 😉 You claimed earlier that it is up to the Linux guys to "port" the i386 build to PowerPC. Yeah....that's gonna happen. Let me fire up my reverse engineering tools and hope I can debug all this spaghetti code. Real programmers code in binary!!!

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
You just didn't listen did you? They are porting the source code to these
other platforms and operating systems as part of the Flash Player 9 (if we
believe them). They deliberately did NOT do the port of the source for
Flash Palyer 8 as it would have delayed the developement of Flash Player 9.

I understand that they have not and will never port version 8. That's ok I guess, but no one has even stated that Adobe will produce a PowerPC vesion for Linux. You keep talking about Adobe porting for 64-bits, but PowerPC is not a 64-bit architecture! Well, at least not on the iMac/iBooks! There is a PowerPC 64 version of the CPU, but they are very rare. It would be nice to support them too, but Apple doesn't sell any computers with the 64-bit version, just the 32-bit version of the PowerPC processor -- and now only Intel in the future (i686).

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
I'm sure they'd love for you to do that .. put it won't be easy. Plaase
read this info by MM developers:

Good link. Thanks! You made some good points previously, but still have not attacked the PowerPC angle :-)

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
No .. its a LOT more than that. Read the article above. If it were
trivial, they would have done it already.

Of course it is more than just that, and I stated so in a previous comment. But what I mean is this -- if Adobe really wanted to, they would have done it by now. They had 8 previous versions to think about it. Now they are at version 9...

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
The danger with making it fully open is that eery tom dick and harry could
take the player in different directions and introbude differnet bugs and
extensions and limitations .. it would likely end up that SWF would not be
the 'universal' format that make it successful.

I think you miss something very big here. Think about Microsoft's Dot Net infrastructure. They have made the specs available to anyone in a professional manner. So, anyone can look at the references and see how to implement a .net compiler and runtime. Adobe has no such public reference document, to my knowledge, for the Flash Player. That means that someone cannot create an Open Source implementation without reverse engineering the binaries themselves. With respect to Microsoft and .Net -- how do you think Mono was created? It wouldn't exist had Microsoft not made the reference publically available. Public standards are a good thing. Yeah, it means Adobe doesn't have the freedom to change things very often without updating the spec and affecting many previous implementations, but it does give the public the ability to have a non-Adobe product that essentially does the same thing (probably not as well -- but at least it will do most common functions well). These are things for Adobe to assess. But openess is a good thing, an Adobe may even learn something from the Open Source developers, like an optimization trick, and use that code in their official builds. It's called sharing, and it's not a bad thing. It wouldn't be the first time...

quote:

Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
Its like a little kid in the back of the car 'Are we there yet?' It will be
there when its done. There are additional issues when porting to 64Bit

Are we there yet? You still didn't say if a PowerPC version is planned for Linux! Can you link me to something that ensures me that Adobe is even approaching the problem in version 9? Thanks for all your hep dude 🙂

Report · May 25, 2006

> Wake up!! You know what I meant...

No .. I had no idea .. it just seemed like nonsense .. even after you
explained it, I'm not sure why 'it doesn't matter' .. or what the 'it' is.

> "They" == Adobe in this case. As above, nothing can be done by the Linux
> distributors ("they") until a PowerPC build for Linux is available
> directly...

Who said anything about linux distributors?

> You claimed earlier that it is up to the Linux guys to "port"
> the i386 build to PowerPC.

WTF? I never said anything of the sort. Please . .re-read the posts.

> Good link. Thanks! You made some good points previously, but still have
> not
> attacked the PowerPC angle :-)

They do actually talk there about what is involved for PowerPc. I would
take a giant leap and suggest that means it is something they are
considering . and hopefully working on.

> Of course it is more than just that, and I stated so in a previous
> comment.
> But what I mean is this -- if Adobe really wanted to, they would have done
> it
> by now. They had 8 previous versions to think about it. Now they are at
> version 9...

That is WHY they can be at version 9 now .. because they didn't "waste" time
porting version 8. It is a marketting decision to skip the port to version
8, and instead get version 9 out quicker becuase version 9 has teh AS3
support in it required for Flex 2. So they can't start selling Flex 2 until
that's done. And Flex2 is aimed at the sort of people who tend to develop
on Linux (broad generalisaiton I know .. designers tend to like Mac's,
developers like Linux)

> Adobe has no such public reference document, to my
> knowledge, for the Flash Player.

Yes .. they do. Its the SWF format. However, yiou are no longer allowed to
use it to make your own player. Very slack on their part.

If you want to develop a player, you need the Flash Palyer source code
license. For that you need to pay (afaik).

> It's called sharing, and it's not a bad thing. It wouldn't be the first
> time...

Not completely bad.. not completely good.

> Are we there yet? You still didn't say if a PowerPC version is planned
> for
> Linux!

I'd have to go hunting. All I have read is that the porting to other
platforms is being better planned for this time round, and that there should
be ports to various Linux and 64Bit platforms. The articles I linked you
to talks about PowerPc porting. Whether there is a port that is for Linux
on a PowerPc (or some other combination) we'll probably have to wait and see
on. Asking about it won't make it happen ... I mean , as if
Macromedia/Adobe actually listen to customers unless they are large
corporations with a lot of money

--
Jeckyl

Report · May 25, 2006

Please read here .. and post comments if you want more info:

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/emmy/archives/2006/05/yes_virginia_th.cfm

and here

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/
--
Jeckyl

Report · Jun 11, 2006

Are we there yet? when is it coming out?

Report · Jun 12, 2006

when its ready