A constant question that comes up with 64 bit Fedora Linux is the availability of software. People usually bemoan the dearth of choices in 64 bit software. Well, Firefox comes in 64 bit -- so we don't have a problem as far as browsing is concerned. However, one problem is that some of the standard browser plugins are not available in 64 bit. Recently this has been changing. Meanwhile, we have some options.
It is now possible to have flash plugin for the 64 bit Firefox. Notice that I keep saying 64 bit all the time. This is because there are lot of instructions and HOWTOs out there that mention plugins for 64 bit Firefox. They usually start off by saying, "Step 1: Install 32bit Firefox". That is where I stop reading them. I think the authors of these instructions should acknowledge that they are describing 32 bit installation. Anyway, we have a flash plugin for 64 bit Firefox. The only question is how well does it work.
The plugin I am talking about is called Gnash. There is an alternative to Gnash and that is to use the 32 bit flashplayer from Adobe (see resources) with the 64 bit Firefox. To accomplish this bit of magic you have to use another 64 bit plugin that essentially lets you use the 32 bit plugins. An enterprising French programmer by the name of Gwenolé Beauchesne (see resources) has built a viewer and plugin (nsplugin) that allows you to use the 32-bit flash in your browser!
Gnash version 0.72 was released on November 17, 2006, and you can get it from the CVS server for Gnash (see resources). To install Gnash, you do the following: In a directory where you do your compiling (e.g.
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/gnash co gnash
cd gnash
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-sound=sdl --enable-plugin --enable-dmalloc
make; make install
This will make and install the standalone player in
NSPlugin on the other hand seems to have done it right in most cases. As I have mentioned in the past and emailed to the author, this viewer had a lot of problems in the past, which, I am glad to say, the author has now fixed and it is extremely functional at this point. There is one caveat. The new Flashplayer from Adobe, version 9, does not work with this plugin. So, for the moment we are restricted to Flashplayer version 7. The other advantage is that some of the other 32 bit plugins (for instance realplay) can also be used by nsplugin. To install nsplugin, you download the rpms from the author's website (see resources) and then you do
rpm -ivh nspluginwrapper-0.9.90.3-1.x86_64.rpm nspluginwrapper-i386-0.9.90.3-1.x86_64.rpm
I decided to install Gnash (version Gnash cvs-20061118) and proceeded to check out some of the sites that I use often and some of the sites another user asked me about. After testing the sites, I uninstalled Gnash and installed the nsplugin and retested the same sites. I have posted the screenshots based on this test (see resources). Well, there is good and bad to this story. The good news is that more of the sites now work reasonably well with Gnash and sound works as well. However, flash movies do not work as yet and do not even display as seen on the New Times website. One of my issues with nsplugin was that it took 100% of the resources and eventually crashed. However, this has now been fixed. Unfortunately, Gnash uses 100% of the resources if you visit any site with flash on it and the laptop fan goes into overdrive all the time. I have reported this to the Gnash mailing list. I hope this is solved in the near future. Some of the sites I visited had problems with displaying the fonts on the site -- Gnash displayed only square boxes, Another site, the flash-Rotator home page did not display at all. My guess is that the author is looking explicitly to see if you have the flash plugin as opposed to simply displaying the page.
I then visited the same sites with nsplugin. All these sites worked fine with this plugin and nsplugin displayed them perfectly. One site that was a big problem for nsplugin was the nike site. Here all I got was a display that the dynamic installer was not working and I have to go and install it manually. It is possible that this site is only visible with flash 9. I have not tested this theory.
One note you should keep in mind when you use the current version 7 of Adobe Flashplayer: A bug in the software prevents some sites from displaying the text in the flash part of the site. You can fix this by doing the following:
mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/
ln -s /etc/X11/fs/config /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config
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