Well; I Googl’d it and found this wiki. I thought I’d attempt to give it some traction since others must have the same question.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome

How to Enable Flash Support

Once I got Google Chrome installed, of course, the Flash plugin wasn’t associated with the web browser. So; here’s a quick tutorial. First off, the Chrome install is now in the “/opt” directory.  If it’s not there create a “plugins” directory:

$ sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

Now you’ll need to make a symbolic link to the “libflashplayer.so” file. This can be accomplished with the following command.

$ cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so

The system will create an alias file named “libflashplayer.so” within that plugins directory. If you’re running an x86_64 system then you’ll need to make a symbolic link to the “nswrapper” file instead of the direct “libflashplayer.so” file. Do a search and find the location that fits your system.

$ locate libflashplayer

Here’s a link to an Ubuntu-related post on Flash support for Google Chrome. http://maketecheasier.com/enable-flash-support-in-google-chrome-in-ubuntu/2009/08/19

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!

I followed Mathias Teugels around a bit (on Identica) and some how found myself at a Flash hero generator site; so I took some time out to create the official/unofficial Fedora Project super hero — The Fedora!  I was limited in some of the tech accessories I could give him, but maybe someone from the art team will run with it.

Make your own Hero at www.cpbintegrated.com/theherofactory.  Be aware that you can’t choose the hero’s name during the generation process.   Create your hero and post a link here.  I’d love to see what you come up with.

Attributes

So; with every hero creation, you must have some specs or a history for your character.  I will not satisfy that requirement today.  Just know that he’s a heavy Linux user and his distribution of choice is… *drum roll please*… Fedora.

I am really surprised at the amount of postings that show you where to get the new Flash Player 10 (x86_64), but not really how to install it if all goes wrong. Yah, they’ll always have, “simply click double click on the RPM file and all will be well in the world.” kind of talk, but what happens if all is NOT well in the world!?  Luckily for me (and you), it always goes wrong – so I end up having to do a manual install every time.  Hopefully this post will help you figure all that out.

Where to Get It

Of course, you’ll need to know where to get this most fantastic program, debuting in Linux.  You think Adobe would make it a bit easier to find.  I had to do a Google search, but I guess since it is an alpha – only the truly persistent will find it.

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

What to Do With It

Once you’ve uncompressed the tarball you will have a simple “libflashplayer.so” file to work with.  What do you do with this .so file you ask?  You can copy or move it to your system’s shared flash player folder.  I’m using Fedora 10 and Firefox (both x86_64) so mine is located in “/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins“.  That’s just a nice place to put it.

I know for the 32-bit versions, if you install it using an RPM or the Package Manger, it’ll put it in “/usr/lib/flash-plugin“.  It can be a combination of  places, but grab the overall concept first. Make the .so file available to multiple browsers on your machine, then refer to it.

Once you have it in a nice, safe place… create a symbolic link from your brower’s plugin directory.  Most of us are using Firfox so run the command:

$ ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib64/firefox-3.0.5/plugins

Of course I’m running Firefox 64-bit.  If you’re not then change the “lib64″ directory to “lib” and if you’re running a different version of Firefox, change that too.

Verify That it Works

If you have Firefox open, simply close it and start it up again.  Check your installed plugins by typing in “about:plugins” in the address bar.  You should see “Shockwave Flash” in there some where.  If you don’t post a comment and I’ll try and help you.

If it’s there… and it should.  Visit any web site that has Flash and you’re good to go. I usually like to try multiple sites at a time just to make sure it doesn’t freeze up on me.  So; I’ll visit YouTube,  MSN and my web site (FergyTech), etc.

Now Give Me Praise for Helping You

Ha-ha, just joking.  I seriously hope this post helped.  Happy surfing you bleeding edge/early adopters you!

What does my blog title mean!?  How can the awesome GNU/LINUX be associated with that dirty dirty word, “proprietary”!?  Well you’ve heard the terms “cutting edge” and “early adopters” before – it usually means having the latest and greatest, but knowing that it’s not perfect.  I experienced that recently and the experience was a bit sobering.  My adventure involves two of the most major components of the Internet!  Well the two most important components for viewing the Internet – Firefox and Flash Player.

I’m running Fedora 9.  This RPM-based linux distribution is known as the “personal” version of Red Hat, nothing corporate about this distro.  So; on  one end it’s a great distro because it has developers that work on Red Hat feeding it patches of code.  For those that may not know, Red Hat is really popular in the business realm.  You’ll see a lot of enterprises running Red Hat.  Ubuntu recently came out their server version, but overall Red Hat has the complete package.

So; Fedora is bleeding edge when it comes to packages – F9 shipped with Firefox 3 beta (or was it release candidate 1) and Flash 9.  Since then Firefox 3.0.2 has been available in their repositories.  It took me a while to figure out this repo thing.  Why did it take so long before the latest version of a package, such as OpenOffice 3.0, would show up in the repo.  Well it’s because once it’s in the repository – you know you have a stable version that works well and good with the distro.

No Cake for Single-thread Sound Processes

I believe the audio package that’s most promising for linux is PulseAudio.  I noticed that whenever I had my music player open (Banshee), I was unable to hear audio on a web site using Flash (ex: YouTube).  It was the same case when I played World of Warcraft (thru Wine).  I came to the conclusion that my audio package is single threaded!  Single threaded!?  That is so Windows 95!  So; I began to make some inquiries on the #fedora chat room on FreeNode.  Someone suggested that I install “libflashsupport.i386″.  Well; I don’t know what it is, but guessing on the file name it looks like a library that helps other packages support Flash.  I installed it and it was gold!  I had my Banshee going and I had YouTube at the same time, I thought all my problems where gone.

After playing some YouTube files I then went to another web site and surprisingly my browser froze!  I thought to myself, “OK; this isn’t a big deal, it’s probably the first time libflashsupport is running so it probably needs to write a preference file somewhere and it’ll all be good the next go around.”  Yah!  At that point every time I went to a site that had Flash on it, no matter how complex or insignificant it was, my browser would freeze.  I have Firefox, Swiftfox, and Flock web browsers.  I tried each browser and at some point they would all crash.

So; the logical thing to do would be to remove the last component I installed – I removed “libflashsupport.i386″, but the problem still happened.  That library seemed to have fudge things up for me.  I ended up manually installing Flash 10, poking around in my package manager for anything that had the word “flash” in it.  Nothing worked.  For about two weeks or so I had so surf the web without Flash support.  At one point I realized that I can’t enjoy the web or some web sites because they use Flash in some kind of way.  We’ve become very dependent on Flash for presentation.

Factory Defaults

My last option was to revert the “factory settings” and see if that does anything.  I removed “firefox” and “flash” using my package manager and then installed them again.  That action put me back at status quo.  I’m running Flash 10 (at some point it made it into the repo) and Firefox 3.0.4.  I learned that I don’t have to have the latest and greatest.  There’s  a reason why I should wait until it’s released in the repo.  All-in-all, the repo is the “proprietary” component to a linux distribution… and I guess I can live with that.

You like my mathematical equation for dead playtime with World of Warcraft on a linuxbox?  When I first installed Fedora 8, I ran Wine 0.9[something] with nVidia’s proprietary drivers.  I had no problem playing World of Warcraft.  I did notice something though – that every time there was a kernel update – when I restarted my Xserver that things would be kind of haywire.  I would normally have to reinstall the video driver and then I’ll be back to status quo.  So; now I’m a bit more seasoned with linux and open source or non-proprietary software means a little more to me than before – and getting that to work with WoW has proved to be quite difficult.

The Free-be Process

First I’m going to talk about the natural progression of a user migrating from the “Windows/Mac” world into this vast ocean of the “linux” world.  I heard on a podcast that most folks come into the linux world for various reasons, but the consistent reason is for the FREE software.  It’s awesome NOT having to pay anything anymore.  As for me, I’ve been used to not paying for software for a very long time… I’m a digital pirate.  There; I’ve come out of the closet (on that issue, I’m really a heterosexual).  I haven’t paid for software in over 10+ years.  But over the past couple years my conscience has gotten the best of me and my escape from the underground is linux.

So; the natural progress is people want free software, later on when they become familiar with all this software – they are exposed to GNU and the fight between proprietary and non-proprietary software.  And that is where I am, my friend.  I wish to run linux with no proprietary software – well except for the NEEDED ones like Flash, etc.  If you’re running open source/non-proprietary software – you will have less complications as the kernel and operating system progresses and improves.

Getting WoW Installed

Ok; back to my dilemma at hand.  I installed Fedora 9 (F9) and I was stoked to see that Wine released their stable version, which is “one point oh” (1.0).  It’s a great milestone to release a 1.0 version and Wine has been in works for years.  I was happy to see that F9 had this in their repos.  I installed it and immediately installed World of Warcraft.  I had no problems with it.  I also installed the kmod-livna drivers for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card.  It worked because I was able to apply “Desktop Effects” and get the whole cube and wobbly windows effect.  But when I try to run WoW nothing would happen.  So; I ran the command in my terminal to see what the error messages were and it seemed to have not registered something with the Wine/Windows Registry.

I’m not certain which component is the culprit, but so far I can’t install any of my games using Wine 1.0.  GTA: San Andreas, Battlefield 2, etc.  I always get some freaky error and I usually just move on to other things I have to do.  So; I’ll try and keep a log of what happens, but this is my situation at the time.  I’ve done some Google searches and WIne forum searches, but no luck yet.