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Hulu Desktop on My Fedora 11

Hulu Desktop application running on a computer playing "House".

I’ve been using the Hulu.com services from time to time to catch up on shows I’ve missed. I don’t have cable so this is a great alternative for me. I remember hearing about Hulu Desktop on a podcast a while back, but I totally forgot about it. Well, earlier this week a friend on Twitter mentioned it and that sparked the tech-geek in me to try and install it. Lucky for me, they have an RPM and a DEB installer. For you hardcore-Linux enthusiasts or masochists, I’m not sure if they have source files available.

Installing Hulu Desktop

I’m using Fedora (of course, it’s the distro of champions) so I chose the RPM route. It was very easy, simply download the RPM file and double-click it. It’ll check for dependencies and install what’s needed.

Flash Hiccup

When the program starts for the first time, it told me it couldn’t locate the Flash plugin. To my surprise, the error message was very helpful. It stated

If you do not have it installed, please modify ~/.huludesktop with the correct location
of libflashplayer.so.

Unless I’m mistaken, under normal circumstances I usually point the apps to the “/usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so” file. Well when I tried that, it didn’t work. After a couple of minutes of searching, I saw that the “nswrapper” version is what the app was looking for. I did a locate and copied and pasted the location to that nswrapper file.

$ locate libflashplayer.so

My Overall Impression

In the end, it was a pretty straight-forward installation and the error messages are actually helpful. I like the application a lot. The interface is slick and while your putsying around different show listings the show that you’re currently watching is still playing in the upper left corner. That’s sweet. I think I can get better video quality if my nVidia drivers worked properly. Let’s hope Fedora 12 fixes that issue. Now I just have to move my desktop machine downstairs and hook it up to my television set and we’re off to the races!

This entry was posted by Marc Ferguson on October 30, 2009 at 9:44 am, and is filed under Linuxapade. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.