Flash Player 10 on FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE

It’s been about two if not three years since I last used FreeBSD as a desktop operating system and I must say I was disappointed with the initial Flash support.

Back when I still had FreeBSD 5 workstations I had Flash 7 running but it was hardly usable for YouTube. This week I decided to trash Windows from the home PC’s but one and built a MySQL replication cluster using five old computers and used the load balancer port that’s found in the FreeBSD ports tree to redirect and distribute the traffic onto these five servers.

One of those 5 computers is my main P4 desktop, so that’s running KDE4 and Firefox 3, but what about Flash? I spent the last three days testing various builds and what not and I must say that 3 years later and Flash support is still a pain in the butt.

On FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE (Oct, 11th 2009) the best setup I got was using linux-f10-flashplayer10 the nspluginwrapper and linux_base-f10, however it’s not an easy task to get installed because of dependencies. So here is what I did to get Flash 10 working with linux_base-f10.

/etc/make.conf
OVERRIDE_LINUX_BASE_PORT=f10
OVERRIDE_LINUX_NONBASE_PORTS=f10

Installed from ports
cd /usr/ports/emulators/linux_base-f10/ && make install clean
cd /usr/ports/www/linux-f10-flashplugin10/ && make install clean
cd /usr/ports/www/nspluginwrapper/ && make install clean

/etc/fstab
linproc /usr/compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0

Mounting linproc
mount /usr/compat/linux/proc

Starting Linux emulation
/etc/rc.d/abi start
/etc/rc.d/sysctl start

Finding the libflashplayer.so
find / -name libflashplayer.so

Installing the libflashplayer.so
nspluginwrapper -v -i /usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-f10-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so

Started Firefox 3, went to the about:plugins page, and bingo it’s detected took a screen shot.

File name: npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
Shockwave Flash 10.0 r32

Now you might be asking your self why did I used Flash 10 instead of Flash 9 like the FreeBSD handbook is suggesting when installing Flash on FreeBSD 7.x! Well the Hanbook needs updating. I don’t know if its the linux emulation or flash 9 that sucks, but its got major sync issues with video and audio playback. Reading more into the issue apparently Adobe fixed something that broke sound support in Flash 9 that affects FreeBSD and not Linux so I decided I would test things out.

I then found out Flash 9 only works with sound when using linux_base-fc4 on FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE, but it’s got jerky video and out of sync audio making YouTube playback useless.

Flash 10 using linux_base-f10 works 90% better then Flash 9 using linux_base-fc4, I can watch YouTube video’s again!

I did notice the adverts, captions and related videos don’t work but oh well, not a big deal. A bigger deal is the WordPress Flash up-loader wont work, so I’m having to use HTML uploads when uploading media files to a WordPress site.

Anyways, I have a semi working setup for now. This reminds me of the days when no one had native JDK builds, and getting java support on Linux and or FreeBSD was a pain in the butt. The FreeBSD Foundation got native JDK builds and the rights to distribute them as binary years ago! when will Adobe do the same for Flash! We all know FreeBSD is the unknown step father of the Unices, but its legal hassles are long done and over with, If Sun released native FreeBSD builds, why wont Adobe?

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