No Flash on Linux, but there are open player alternatives
Adobe may be discontinuing its standalone Flash Player for Linux, but Gnash and Lightspark both offer an open source solution
By Katherine Noyes | PC World | Published: 19:21, 28 February 2012
When Adobe announced last week that it plans to discontinue its standalone Flash Player for Linux, it noted that updated versions of Flash Player will subsequently be available to Linux users only through Google's Chrome browser.
Though security updates on the final version 11.2 for Linux will continue for five years, there's no denying the announcement was disappointing for those of us using Linux - particularly when taken on top of Adobe's decision last summer to abandon desktop Linux users with its AIR environment as well.
It remains to be seen how much longer Flash will continue to matter as HTML5 grows, of course.
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In the meantime, though, it's worth remembering that Flash Player is not the only way to view Flash content. In fact, as a reader recently reminded me, there are open source alternatives to Flash Player that offer Linux users another option. Here's a quick look at two of them.
1. Gnash
Gnash is a free and open source Flash movie player that's based on GameSWF, and it's available both as a standalone player and as a browser plugin for Firefox - and all other Gecko-based browsers, for that matter - as well as for Chromium and Konqueror.
The Gnash project actually just released an update to the software earlier this month, so the latest version is now Gnash 0.8.10, which is available for download from the GNU.org site. Though it's still considered beta-level software, this latest release incorporates numerous bug fixes and enhancements, including an OpenVG renderer.
Gnash does play YouTube videos, its developers say, but it doesn't yet support version 10 of the SWF format. All Gnash source code is released under GPLv3 or later.
2. Lightspark
Another free and open source Flash Player alternative is Lightspark, an LGPLv3-licenced Flash player and browser plugin that "currently supports YouTube well enough for daily use," its makers say.
The latest release of Lightspark is version 0.5.4.1, which was just launched at the beginning of February with added YouTube support. It can be downloaded for free from the project's Launchpad page.
Both of these options are clearly still in their fairly early stages, and they probably won't yet be able to play absolutely everything you throw at them. Still, development work is continuous, and they get better with each new release.
While the world waits for HTML5 and other open web technologies to take over, these open source packages could be just the ticket for Linux users looking for a new way to view Flash content.
Comments
Chris Lu said: 5 years is forever for software
guest said: You are joking right Adobe will maintain flash 112 for 5 years and that means if it becomes outdated the open source non alternatives would be even more outdated seeing that gnash is not even catching up to flash 10 yet As for lightspark being good enough for Youtube who cares about Youtube You can already watch many Youtube videos even without flash html5 and Linux users already have a Firefox plugin called the flashvideoreplacer which allows you to watch Youtube and vimeo without flash except for the Youtube 3d channel and there is also a standalone Youtube player called minitube But what about life streaming VOIP and other sites that require flash In 5 years many things will change and hopefully flash will become irrelevant In the meantime 112 probably will be still good for most sites in the next couple of years or so and for sites that require up to date flash hopefully not too many it is going to be Chrome