FlashPlayer 9 Beta for Linux released

[astgtciv]

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

[[Sx]]

Ho, ho, ho... xmass came early this year :)

[Tink]

I was chatting about Linux to someone the other day. I have Ubuntu ready to install on Parellels but i just haven't bothered, as it seems pointless, cos none of the software i used will run on Linux (well i guess eclipse does).

what are you guys actually using Linux for?

[[Sx]]

Let me rephrase your question: What do you use Windows for?

Answer: well... nothing?

Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS X... those are just operating systems, you don't use them for anything except running your system (and thus, they are way over-priced and over-appreciated, but that's another topic). The actual usefulness of a computer comes from a third-party software.

And there comes one quite a big prejudice - *nix platform has no software. Sure, if you are in DTP fields you might find lack of DTP software on unix platforms quite a bit annoying, but why don't you brag about it to your favorite DTP software vendor instead of yelling - Linux (BSD, etc.) is useless, why are you using it? It's not Linux's fault that software vendors find it either unattractive platform (read it: we think we can't make enough money on it) or are blackmailed by competition (should I remind you of what happened with Corel?). Both, Linux and BSD are extremely useful OSes which definitely gives the most bang (more than Windows in any case) for a buck (hmmm, any number divided by zero is positive infinity).

But, if we except the DTP field, *nix platform lacks anything but software. I would even go that far to say that Windows has less third party software than *nix. I mean, your question in reverse can ask any electronics engineer who does PCB design and electronics circuits simulation - there is not a single robust app for such purposes that works on Windows.

But then again, we are moving focus from the OS to the third-party software, and that's not by far the best way to judge about OSes. Linux in terms of OS architecture, security, stability, memory management and tones of other stuff leaves Windows light years behind. I don't want to start another platform wars on this thread, but there are certain and noticeable advantages of Linux over Windows. Only two big disadvantages are - lack of professional software in some fields (DTP mainly) and smaller user base (which makes problems for newbies as it takes some time to find someone that knows answer to your question - for Windows that can be a kid-next-door).

What I use Linux (well, I prefer BSD over it but that's another topic) for? Let's start from programming - all the backend and socket servers I do, I design on *nix. All the DB design I do also on *nix. Most of Flash programming I do also on *nix, and with cross-platform AS3 compiler freely available directly from Adobe I'll be doing that more and more...

What do I use Windows for? Well, quite much the same, with exception of serious programming and addition of graphics stuff or stuff that doesn't exist for *nix and wont run acceptably through WINE.

Rest of the everyday stuff like surfing, mailing, chatting, writing, planning, downloading etc. - I do from the OS I currently find myself in as those fields works equally well on both and I use almost all the same software for both platforms.

What is important here, and what is the topic of this discussion, is that we got F9 player for Linux. It's important for you as windows-only developer as well, as the main goal of Web is to be accessible by anyone, and tho even it's still a small community, having even one more eye to see your site, application or whatever is worth pure gold. Your site doesn't mean a squad if it's Windows and IE only as you are willingly rejecting a good percent of internet users. After all, few years ago no one (except idealistic developers) cared about those few percents of non-IE users - today they are paying the toll by having to redesign their system to work with FF. Just because someone is a market leader, it doesn't mean that competition is sleeping and that they won't overthrow the lazy 'leader' at first given chance. In that terms, it's good to see Adobe slowly releasing software for most platforms as they are broadening their influence on the market and this certainly means a lot to us Flash/Flex developers, no matter which OS are we using.

[Tink]

whoa whoa whoa whoa, lets rewind a bit here.

for one i am not going around yelling Linux is useless. i stated that i've downloaded it, but have installed it because i don't know what i can use on it in my workflow, and therefore its pointless. I am also not a windows-only developer as you seem to automatically presumed. i'm really not sure where u got that from as i never mentioned Windows at all.

It seems to be you've immediately became very defensive when I'm asking you with an open mind what you guys are using Linux for. I don't need all the facts and figures of Linux security etc. I just wanted to know what I could use it for.

You say you don't want another OS war, but it seems to me your trying to start one, instead of just giving me an informative list of what software I can use (or what you use) on Linux so I could start experimenting with the OS and using it in my workflow.

If it is useful to me in my workflow, then i will use it, but I don't know enough about it, which is why i asked.

sheeeeesh!!!

[[Sx]]

Uh, sorry for my overreaction, but when you get bitten by a snake, you will be scared of a lizard, and that often leads to false presumptions. From experience, when someone comes in with question 'What do you use Linux for?' it's usually followed by "It's useless, it's ugly, it's not user friendly, there is no software for it, it's for zealots and haxx0r-wannabes" etc. and I've been in such discussions hundreds of times and usually in non-*nix-friendly environments, so taking a defensive stand point comes automatically from sub-conscience level.

It's like with gay people - they were so dissed by the neocon community that they now starts explaining their point of view even if not asked to, even to a people that fully support and understand them.

As I said, I use *nix mainly for programming and everyday tasks. I'll be glad to give you a list of software you can use for your specific needs (of course, if there is such software on *nix platforms). All depends what you attend to use it for.

Again, sorry for jumping on you like a mad dog.

Cheers...

[Tink]

no probs :)

by *nix u mean Linux or more specifically Ubuntu?

I know i can use Eclipse, and I think I'm right in saying its possible to get Flex Builder 2.0 running on Linux.

I also use on a daily basis
Flash
Dreamweaver
Photoshop
Illustrator
Excel (for invoices etc)
Word

i'd also be interested if there anything like After Effects available at the moment.

Also you mentioned WINE. I did try and get this up and running on OSX once unsuccesfully (i'm shit at that sort of stuff). How would those programs run under WINE on Linux (Ubuntu i guess) speed wise?

Thanks for any info

[firdosh]

Hey Tink,
I use windows for a lot of multimedia development using 3dsmax, Photoshop , Flash , Dreamweaver , Office and Flex. You can most of the time find some open source projects for these apps

I use a linux system where

3dsMax - Blender3d
Photoshop - Gimp
Office - open Office

some other good apps aptana for web development based of eclipse and flex now runs in linux too . So the only problem for you would be using the flash ide

cheers :)
firdosh

[CyanBlue]

Yeah... I'd love to hear what/how you can Flash in *nix environment especially for AS1 in general and AS3... ;)

Um... What happened to Corel???

[[Sx]]

by *nix u mean Linux or more specifically Ubuntu?

No, I generally mean on POSIX-compatible platforms, and more specifically unix-based or unix-inspired systems.
Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, Fedora Core, SuSE, Mandriva, etc. are all different distributions of Linux OS - that is they use Linux kernel and base toolset, but differ in terms of kernel version and settings, system design, package management and third-party software that they deliver with their distributions.
Other popular unix-based/inspired OSes are BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD to name few) and Solaris, for example, and there are lots of OS-es based on BSD, for example MacOS X (it's based on Darwin BSD which you can install on a PC as well, tho you can install MacOS X on a PC today as well, but that's another topic).


I know i can use Eclipse, and I think I'm right in saying its possible to get Flex Builder 2.0 running on Linux.

I also use on a daily basis
Flash
Dreamweaver
Photoshop
Illustrator
Excel (for invoices etc)
Word


Eclipse was originally designed on Linux ;) It's possible, with a few tweaks, to run Flex Builder 2 on Linux as well and I guess Adobe/MM will soon offer a build for *nix platforms as well.

As for Flash IDE, unfortunately there is no version for Linux. However, I find it working quite well through WINE with only several problems. If you need Flash 8 Video Encoder you can use ffmpeg which does the job noticeably faster. ( http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ )

There are tons of WYSIWY(W)G HTML editors for Linux but since I don't use them I can't recommend any - google is your friend ;)

Photoshop - well, quite decent replacement for it would be the GIMP. You would be amazed what it can do considering that it's open source and free. The sweetest thing is that you can actually write your own plugins (well, scripts) without having to learn the complex API and employ SDK libraries for it. GIMP is available for Windows as well ( http://www.gimp.org ).

Illustrator, unfortunately, doesn't have decent enough alternative, but InkScape is quite a good SVG editor and it's getting better and better. Given the native F9 SVG support, it's quite useful tool. ( http://www.inkscape.org/ )

Excel, Word functionality is perfectly well implemented in OpenOffice.org. I really can't think of some option that MS Office contains (and which I need) that OpenOffice.org doesn't. It's actually a very robust and professional office package and costs $0. As a bonus, it can easily read and write MS Office formats, plus it have a flawless export to PDF. As a matter of fact, OpenOffice.org is the only Office package I use for years now (and before I used StarOffice which was a base of OpenOffice.org) on all platforms I use. If I would to set top-10 list of Linux-available (and crossplatform in general) applications I'd certainly put OpenOffice.org on a second place (first would be beloved Eclipse). ( http://www.openoffice.org ).

i'd also be interested if there anything like After Effects available at the moment.


Unfortunately, as with graphics editing, Linux does have a noticeable lack of applications on video editing field. No Final Cut, no After Effects... tho I did manage to run AE via WINE but it wasn't performing brilliantly. Company that promises to change that is called Interactive Effects (IFX) - they have some sweet video editing tools for Linux so you might want to check that out: http://www.ifx.com/products/ . Also, NewTek is, as I heard, slowly translating their packages (specifically Video Toaster and Lightwave 3D) for Linux platform (they did release StreamerNET renderer for linux years ago). DTP and video editing fields are soon to emerge on Linux in their full glory.


Also you mentioned WINE. I did try and get this up and running on OSX once unsuccesfully (i'm shit at that sort of stuff). How would those programs run under WINE on Linux (Ubuntu i guess) speed wise?


WINE stands for WINE Is Not a Emulator. It doesn't emulate windows as do other virtual machines (like vmware), so generally, you don't loose speed on emulation or resources separation. What WINE does is intercepting and translating legacy WinAPI calls to Linux native calls. The less application is dependent on WinAPI the faster it will run. For example Flash IDE runs almost equally as fast. To give you some sense of how system runs via WINE - I was able to play Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in Linux without annoying glitches (apart from the menu and few others), without much slowdown compared to Windows. I managed to run Oblivion through Cedega, tho, but Cedega is based on WINE. Also, some of the applications that do get stuck in base WINE do work through Cedega even if it's not mention for that. There is another commercial application based on Wine called CrossOver Office - through it you can seamlessly run most of the applications you wrote above - didn't purchase that one tho, but judging by the community it's able to run MS Office, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver and several others without any problems or glitches and at the full speed. Given the price of it, it's almost the safest bet for people wanting to run their most-used applications on Linux. Not to mention that they are actively financing WINE development. ( http://www.winehq.com/ , http://www.transgaming.com/, http://www.codeweavers.com )

See, it's not that horrible and spooky - I bet I can teach your average grandma to use Linux/BSD ;)

[Tink]

great replies guys.

from what i know of linux is always been a fairly geeky OS (no dig intended) i.e. ya need to know what your doing to get around. from what i hear Ubuntu has bridged this gap and its the most user friendly OS (or an OS that most of us are used to) or is it just that Unbuntu has manage to get the most hype?

for someone who really don't wanna **** to much with OS's (i just want to get software up and running asap and get on with work with minial fuss, and wants to install it via parellels, what would ya recommend?

thanks again

[astgtciv]

Wow, I couldn't have predicted that this seemingly innocuous post would blossom into a full-fledged OS discussion :D

Personally I haven't used Linux lately, but it's really only due to my personal lazyness (for the same reason I will readily admit FF's superiority to IE on many accounts, but due to inertia continue with my everyday IE usage). Certainly my Windows experience leaves something to be desired... (especially now, after some Logitech webcam drivers which I have installed and subsequently uninstalled crippled my system's memory management in a way that I can't seem to fix, even with running system file checkers, etc. :D)

[Flash Gordon]

just a though. I found Fedora (linux an off branch of Red Hat but a free distro) very easy to use. ;)

[firdosh]

jahashka is a good video editing program

firdosh

[jsebrech]

I ran linux for years as my primary desktop OS, from 98 to 02. Started out with red hat, then moved on to debian. I eventually left the platform because I got tired of the endless tinkering and of the lack of progress on the usability front. Linux is more powerful than windows or mac os, there's no doubt about that, but it also requires a greater time and effort investment.

I'm on the mac now. I'm happy. It's *nix underneath anyway.

Servers, on the other hand, they're another story. I wish all servers ran linux. Makes things a lot easier.

[[Sx]]

great replies guys.

from what i know of linux is always been a fairly geeky OS (no dig intended) i.e. ya need to know what your doing to get around. from what i hear Ubuntu has bridged this gap and its the most user friendly OS (or an OS that most of us are used to) or is it just that Unbuntu has manage to get the most hype?

for someone who really don't wanna **** to much with OS's (i just want to get software up and running asap and get on with work with minial fuss, and wants to install it via parellels, what would ya recommend?

thanks again

Well, I'd dare to say that most Linux distributions nowdays are everything but geeky. Unless you think that console is a geeky thing - if it is I'd consider Windows geeky as well - I almost always have cmd shell opened in Windows (good habits shouldn't be changed ;) ). That 'geeky' title comes from the days when Linux started to gain popularity, like 6-7 years ago or more, and those were the times when you actually had to know quite a bit about it (and computers in general) to be able to configure and maintain it properly. Since then, focus in Linux development was more on the GUI and hardware support than anything else and distributions nowdays do not much differ from Windows in terms of ease-of-use (of course MacOS X is still the king the field of idiot-proof OS-es, I guess Steve is always the first tester :p ).

However, even the given focus didn't make it much more appealing to average users (in terms of system knowledge) because there are still several big bottlenecks that makes life a living hell even to *nix masters. One of the biggest would be - non-standard package management. Sure, I can live without it, I'm used to 'make' and other compilation instructions more than searching the net for binary packages, but it's something that puts off lots of people. Problem on that field comes from diversity between Linux distributions where every publisher tried to push their own packages system (rpm, deb, etc.) as a standard. That battle is still on. And linked to packages comes the update system - not a lot of people feel comfortable on recompiling their kernels, checking what versions of applications do they have, then removing them, then installing new ones, etc. As with packages, there are dozen of update system and unlike the packages, those don't work not nearly as expected. So most people choke-in with old applications and so that came with the distro just to avoid those complex procedures that can go wrong easily.

Actually, what Linux lacks generally is - uniformness & standards. In Windows you would always be able to tell someone how to, for example, remove some buggy driver. Control Panel is always on the same place, Device Manager is always on the same place, layout of those always look the same. And while non-uniformness kicks off newbies and make support harder, that's only a tip of the iceberg. The biggest problem is that it directly kicks off big companies from developing software for it, including hardware manufacturers which don't supply drivers for Linux. Reason is quite simple - they wouldn't be able to give quality support, or it would cost them much more than support for standardized platforms, to their end customers which would not only harm Linux 'rating', but the company would suffer as well from bad publicity.

Agrh, I started it again :rolleyes: ... Anyways, just so you know what awaits you there...

I wouldn't say that Ubuntu is the easiest to use. It's popular because of free CDs they deliver. I did saw Mandrake 10 (now Mandriva) when it was released and I think it was fairly easy to use for beginners (actually the easiest I saw till then), don't know how it's now.

I'd suggest you Fedora Core, as FlashGordon suggested, as well. It does have it's quirks, but it does have quite a big user base and you might find solutions to your problems quite fast. It's YUM does quite a decent job for updating/installing new software so it might save you some trouble in the beginning.

I personally use 'my own' Linux built from scratch to accommodate my specific needs, but I think it wouldn't be wise to suggest such a thing to "someone who really don't wanna **** to much with OS's" ;)

[Tink]

I thought i'd come back to this thread after my experience with Ubuntu over the last few days.

Installation goes fine but the max res available is 1024 x 768. I search all over the web and tried lots of different stuff all unsuccessful. Most buggering up Ubuntu so it don't start up next time. I deleted the VM and done a fresh install 6 times and now I give up.

With fear of offending people here I have to say its pretty shit. Changing the res should be a simple task, and not require a terminal geek.

Ubuntu is not for humans!!

Least I gave it a go huh :)

[jsebrech]

You young'uns and your 1024 by 768. Spoiled I say! ;)

My first foray into linux (back in 1998) meant waiting until a driver was available for my matrox, rebuilding X with that driver (because I couldn't wait for the binary release) and then calculating and entering modelines for my monitor so that X would know how to drive it. I'm telling you, when you've read the XFree86 howto and calculated your own modelines, you can safely declare yourself too geeky.

[astgtciv]

lol :D I don't even know what "modelines" are... and this ignorance gives me a good feeling for some reason :)

[jsebrech]

A modeline is basically a specification of the various intervals needed to correctly synchronize pixels with the scanning beam as it moves across the monitor's inner surface.

Incidentally, before I configured that matrox correctly, my resolution was limited to 320x240. Ever tried to do anything at that resolution? Good times :)

[astgtciv]

Well my first comp was a Commodore 64, its resolution was 320 x 200 (according to http://www.myoldcomputers.com/museum/comp/c64.htm). So I guess the answer, amazingly enough, is yes! :)