Adobe Flash 11 is now stable for 64-bit Linux | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Flash 11 is now stable for 64-bit Linux

adobe.com

199 pointsnodata52 comments

I can't find a press release specifically mentioning it yet. Download adobe apt/repo file from here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

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Since I'm running Ubuntu, I decided to try the 'download for Ubuntu' option on the download form. It went down like this:

- Firefox asked me whether I wanted to launch the 'apturl' tool. I accepted its suggestion.

- I got a dialog saying "This will enable the Canonical Partners repository". I'm pretty sure I already had it enabled, but sure, what the hell.

- I got the usual 'downloading updated package lists' dialog.

- I got an error dialog complaining that 'adobe-flashplugin' is a purely virtual package.

And that was that.

Guess it's back to trusty ol' tarballs.

I also went through this, gave up, then downloaded the tarball, and copied the plugin to its spot in /var/lib/.

I did backup the old plugin though, just in case.

I also tried just updating Chrome, which is supposed to have the newer flash version, but it didn't have it. Not sure why..

Is this the first time you've circumvented the package management system? If you have done it before, maybe that's the cause of the pain now? Just guessing, since these things usually work without any complaint for me.

At least in debian:

    sudo update-flashplugin-nonfree --install

works flawlessly.

I think his point was that he followed the instructions, and they failed. If he had been using Windows, he'd have followed the instructions and succeeded. This is the problem with Linux.

FWIW, I currently run Ubuntu on my laptop, and very much like it, Windows 7 on my work desktop, and my previous laptop ran OSX.

It would be funny --- if it wasn't so tragic --- how much easier to use and manage free software is. Especially considering it's almost all just './configure ; make && make install' at the base level.

I friggin' love pacman.

That's a good point. If Flash was free software, there wouldn't be a need for a download page - it would be in the repositories already.

I worked for Adobe and there are more than 100 licensed libraries and even more patents used in Flash. There's almost no chance it'll be open source.

And it would have been integrated in browsers directly, and we could have run valgrind on it and fixed all the bugs.

On fedora:

- Go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

- Select Linux

- Select YUM

- Install the RPM it gives me

- `yum install flash-player`

Flawless.

    yum install flash-plugin

Yup, that's correct. Disregard me.

use the flash-aid plugin for firefox, it works like a charm

Not that you are one, but it's funny to watch Linux fanboys run into trouble with tasks that should be simple. It of course doesn't diminish their opinion of Linux being the greatest desktop by far.

No press release specifically mentioning the 64-bit Linux support, but it's out!

You can download the yum repo/apt repo files as well as the rpm and tar.gz files from here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

Edit: or on the page linked above, click the grey almost-hidden download button on the right.

In other words, "How to hide a download button". Talk about the disconnect between graphic design and web design.

And it's still rather far from being mature.

Debian squeeze x64 user of Chrome with nvidia-* 260.19.44-1 drivers here.

For instance go to:

[url-redacted]

1. RBM on flash content, Settings. Now try to set anything with mouse (i.e. w/o using keyboard, especially Tab + Space).

2. RBM on flash content, Zoom in. How much of the view has been redrawn?

Now let's go to vimeo:

[url-redacted]

And HD video still doesn't play smoothly and it's sometimes off-sync. My desktop ([url-redacted]) surely isn't top-notch one, but outside of Flash world I can use it to watch 1080p50p video material, so something is wrong with Flash, and it's even worse in Linux department, unfortunately.

All of these things (1. + 2. + HD video) have been working for me for a long time. YouTube 1080p content works fine, though I kind of doubt it's using VDPAU, so it's bound to hit the CPU (4x 1.9GHz i5, hardly cutting edge) fairly hard. I'm using the 64bit flashplayer 11 from the sevenmachines ppa.

Are you using Chrome or Chromium? Chrome comes with its own flash version.

I use a beta version of Google Chrome (latest 15.0.874.81 beta) from official repo (deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main). I remember it was shipped with Flash, but it worked not as good as I would like it to, so I was using 64-bit betas (not great either, to be honest), IIRC by disabling Chrome's own Flash in about:plugins. Now looking there I see only one Flash plugin, which is the one installed in my system (Location: /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so). So even if Chrome's custom Flash is better, as you imply, dunno how to turn it on for a test ride now.

Also

    dpkg --contents google-chrome-beta_15.0.874.81-r103858_amd64.deb | grep -i fl

reveals nothing.

I didn't mean to imply that Chrome's custom Flash is better. I have no idea if it is since I run Firefox (typically) and Chromium (rarely). Like I said, I use the 64bit Flash player from the sevenmachines ppa (Ubuntu 11.04).

https://launchpad.net/~sevenmachines/+archive/flash

Chrome's custom Flash is better, because the Chrome generic plugin code is not very good. And that is due to [the plugin API being very complicated and full of bugs -- http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/05/plugins... .

When will it be stable for OS X?

I'm not joking.

Amen. I'm sick of my laptop sounding like a 747 every time I look at a video.

It's not easy getting a 747 rumble out of a laptop. You're lucky, the sound is usually tinny.

But there's a difference between "stable" and the situation where the cpu does the grunt work for the video instead of your gpu hardware. If Adobe and Apple can play nice maybe they can assist each other in getting the above changed in order to lessen the load on your cpu. It's more a "flash meets mac" thing, meaning both sides could do well to help resolve imho.

> Amen. I'm sick of my laptop sounding like a 747 every time I look at a video.

The iPhone Simulator gets my MacBook Air "sounding like a 747" as well. Since it isn't made in Flash, I'm left to conclude that:

    1) any program that is demanding will cause the fan to come on; and 
    2) it shouldn't be a big surprise that Flash will cause the fan to come on.

When will it be stable for Windows?

And i'm not joking either. Flash is the main cause of browser instability and RAM hogging.

And this without even getting started on security.

The YUM download went off without a hitch on Fedora. Still requires you go in and do a

    yum install flash-player

assuming you had the old i386. It seems to have appropriately replaced the adobe-linux-i386 yum conf file as well with the newer one.

Does that include the fancy Unreal Engine stuff, too?

For example, this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y

No. flash 11 won't have GPU acceleration on linux. Adobe said there were too many driver issues.

That's a shame - From 10,000 ft, it should be possible to make it as least as stable as WebGL in Chrome + Linux. That, from my limited sampling has been good enough for ongoing development, and maybe deployment with caveats.

Flash is a product by Adobe. It's not an open standard. Adobe is only one company with limited resources. It's time to uninstall it and move on.

Move on to what?

To open standards? I uninstalled Flash a couple of weeks ago. That's the first step. Every few days I hit some video that I wish I could watch. Sometimes I reach for my iPad to watch it. You would think since I can watch it on my iPad, the site could detect that I don't have Flash and use another codec.

This boggles the mind. If they would just implement the renderer on top of OpenGL then they would get cross-platform hardware acceleration, even on mobile devices since a lot of them have OGL support these days. Considering that they still argue that they have a stable and optimized product, I'm forced to conclude that Adobe's staff are somewhat technically incompetent or that their Flash code base has a huge amount of technical debt.

With respect to Mr Jobs, it's nice to finally see a story up that isn't about him.

Flash isn't the best story to start with :-\

Speaking as a Linux user, this is as significant as the first time I got sound to work. Flash on Linux (especially 64 bit) has been horribad. Hopefully it's less bad now.

Eurgh. I can't even look at non Jobs related article comments without him being mentioned.

That's nice. Now hopefully they will maintain it.

This worked for Fedora 14:

    # cat /etc/yum.repos.d/adobe-linux-x86_64.repo

    [adobe-linux-x86_64]
    name=Adobe Systems Incorporated
    baseurl=http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/linux/x86_64/
    enabled=1
    gpgcheck=1
    gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

    # yum install flash-plugin

I guess that means I can finally get rid of the 32 bit libraries. Yeah!

I'll be the judge of that.

does this mean that a video doesn't trigger 100% CPU usage anymore? can't wait to try it

Depends on the video, the CPU, the GPU, and how the video is displayed in Flash, but yes, it should work better, more often (though I'm not sure the 64-bitness is that relevant compared with the other stuff).

It is. The nspluginwrapper used to run the 32-bit Flash in a 64-bit Firefox (dunno if it also applies to other browsers) really slowed things down. I got much better performance running the 64-bit plugin, all other things -- including the Flash version number -- being equal.

Last I heard, the state of Linux drivers for hardware video decoding did not make it worth it to Adobe to support it. But that news is about 1.5 years old, so maybe it changed in the meantime.

Edit: Flash 11 youtube 360p is using 14% of my CPU. mplayer 480p uses 4%. shrug

the improvement is noticeable, videos on 33% usage only

Depends on your GPU and drivers. I don't remember the specifics, but I believe only (most?) the closed source drivers can support hardware acceleration.

I remember installing Flash on Debian about 4 years ago and wishing there was a 64 bit version so I didn't have to clutter up the system with another version of Firefox or the 32bit bridge libraries. Glad to see that this was resolved though.

I can't bear the pretentiousness of this video. The filler clips are so overdone, from the high-aperture clip of the can of Canada Dry Ice and whatever else it was by the guy's computer mouse to the nerf guns to the shot of a very typical Command Prompt screen in Matrix green. They're trying so hard.

Hehe, "stable"

Dear Adobe:

Just because he's dead doesn't mean the rest of us don't still want your proprietary garbage off the web. We've seen the future, and it's not yours.

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