Adobe resuscitates 64-bit Flash for Linux

Adobe has resuscitated Flash Player for 64-bit Linux, drawing cheers from penguins across the planet. On Wednesday, the company released a beta version of Flash Player 11 for the desktop, and this included a 64-bit Linux beta. In June of last year, Adobe murdered an experimental version of Flash 10.1 for 64-bit Linux, but it …

[Anonymous Coward]

"Penguins rejoice at prophesy fulfilled"

Do we?

Reeeeeeally?

[Reverend Brown]

Ah...

Glad they got around to it. If that's one less bit of annoying trickery involved in being able to see "NYAN NYAN NYAN" on YouTube, then it's a tiny hair closer to public acceptance. Myself, I'll probably install it, and promptly install a flash blocker like usual.

Spawn of Satan, because you don't have a Beastie icon.

[Greg J Preece]

Been running this for ages

Flash-Aid has been installing 64-bit Flash for ages. They were the 10.x betas from Adobe Labs, and they were pretty damned stable. Wonder how good this one is.

[A Known Coward]

Hardware decoding

The difference between this release and those earlier 10.x betas is that this one includes hardware video decoding, at least for nvidia GPUs with the proprietary driver. That makes fullscreen and/or HD* flash video finally possible for 64bit browsers. For those who care about stuff like iPlayer (not me, I just record everything) this is a significant release.

Adobe added hardware decoding (VDPAU) to the 10.x line for 32bit months ago.

* HD that is if you think that it's all about pure resolution, not picture quality

[sisk]

Stable?

You have a funny definition of the word 'stable' if you're using it to refer to the 64 bit Flash 10.1 for Linux. It was a steaming pile of bug crap in my experience. The damn thing never lasted more than 5 minutes without crashing on my otherwise rock solid system.

Here's hoping Adobe does a better job this time around.

[vagabondo]

Great News

Adobe trying hard to bring the stability and security of MS Windows to the Linux desktop.

[asdf]

lmao

Very well said. Adobe software is the worst major vendor software in the industry on all platforms. The advantage of being a pioneer in outsourcing I guess.

[Anonymous Coward]

Non Sequitur

Odd that they would bring BACK flash on 64-bit Linux, when they just barely killed Air on Linux. Will Adobe be Linux-friendly, or not?

[Paul Shirley]

and you can submit bugs here.

"and you can submit bugs here."

Surely that's Adobes job. And they're very good at it ;)

[Flocke Kroes]

Did you actually ask any penguins for their reation?

Mine is "not interested". If I wanted a flash player I would install gnash.

http://www.gnashdev.org/

[sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD]

Gnash isn't all that...

... flash?

Seriously though, I run linux sans flash on my 'secure' machine don't worry about it.

My gaming rig runs all kinds of crap but I don't care.

/shrug if it gets hacked of virii'ed. It's windows. Only entertainment there.

Best of both worlds. Having 2 of them. Best compromise. Hah.

[Tom 7]

Ready and waiting

by my delete key.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not here…

I switched to using Gnash… most Flash applets work in it, and it's fully open-sourced under the GNU GPL.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it this article is tongue in cheek?

I've yet to meet a true Linux geek who doesn't block Flash at the same time as bitching about how pointless it is and how much they hate it.

If they had their way, the internet would have a few thousand users and would be little more than a BBS. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

"If they had their way ..."

"the internet would have a few thousand users and would be little more than a BBS"

You say that like it was a bad thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

RE: Little more than a BBS

IIRC, full colour computer screens were only invented to allow people to look at porn ... at a time when it was pretty much only Geeks on BBS's ...

plus: http://xkcd.com/484/

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Sdaly...

Sadly, there isn't any Stage3D hardware acceleration on Linux, so the upgrade is mostly pointless.

See : http://sebleedelisle.com/2011/07/no-molehill-on-linux/

[Benchops]

Redeployment

It'll be all the Adobe iOS developers suddenly having had nothing to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

So long the Flashblock plugins in Firefox & Chrome still work.

That's the only rejoicing I'll be doing.