FlashPlayerStandalone

Revision 1 as of 2005-08-07 11:01:47

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This is designed to be a cookbook entry. Just something fun to do, and you might learn something from it too. Since Macromedia doesn't release a standalone flash player for Linux, and their plugin has some serious flaws in its audio syncing and a few other features, in my opinion it's better to just use a windows version. So I did, and it works great. I'll tell you what I did.

note: I'm assuming some familiarity with the terminal: Applications -> System Tools -> Terminal. This is where you will enter these commands.

All of the commands on this page require super-user privileges. To become the super-user, either open a root terminal (Applications -> System Tools -> Root Terminal) or become the super-user from a regular terminal with this command:

sudo -s 

It will ask you to type your password, and then change your prompt so there is a # instead of a $. This is the mode you must use to make administrative changes to your system, such as the ones we will be making in this section. Alternatively, you can precede each command with "sudo".

Compile Wine

To run a windows program, we'll need a windows emulator. I followed the [http://winehq.com/site/download-deb instructions on wine's website], but I'll summarize them for you here.

Adding the Repository

First, we will add the wine source repository to your list.

You must invoke an editor on apt's repository list

gedit /etc/apt/sources.list 

And add this line to it:

deb-src http://wine.sourceforge.net/apt/ source/ 

Save the file, and then have APT refresh its package lists with this command:

apt-get update 

Building, Compiling, Installing

First, lets install the packages wine depends on. This will get anything it requires to be compiled with:

apt-get build-dep wine 

When that finishes, download and compile wine with this command:

apt-get --build source wine 

Compiling may take a long time, ten to twenty minutes or so. Relax. When it finishes compiling, install the .deb file it creates.

dpkg --install wine*.deb 

The * in that filename is a wildcard, which automatically matches whatever the letters in the middle of that filename really are. Once you've done that, wine is installed. You can now delete all of the temporary files it left lying around in this directory.

rm -rf wine* libwine*

Now that you have wine, you can run windows exe files by typing "wine" before their name. Do not do this as root. First exit your super-user environment for safety.

exit 

The rest of this tutorial assumes you are still super-user.

Setting Up Flashplayer

First, download a Stand-alone Flash Player .exe. I used this Flash Player 6 because it was the best thing I could find.

wget http://www.ahlrates.com/players/SAFlashPlayer.exe 

Put it somewhere central on the computer. I decided to put it in /usr/win. You can substitute this directory with wherever, or leave it where it is.

mkdir /usr/win
mv SAFlashPlayer.exe /usr/win/ 

Now lets make a desktop icon. Right-click on your desktop and select "Create Launcher". Name it Flash Player, and in the "Command" field type

wine /usr/win/SAFlashPlayer.exe 

You can even give it an icon. I used this one:

wget http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/images/flash_rune.gif 

Tuck this away somewhere like /usr/share/icons

mv flash_rune.gif /usr/share/icons/ 

Then click on the big icon that says "No Icon" in your Create Launcher window, type in the proper directory (/usr/share/icons/) and select the icon for it. Viola, a beautifully installed Flash Player that wont lose audio sync. Double-click it and test it out. You can type any URL into the File->Open dialog, and it will load and play it for you. Enjoy!