I was delighted to discover yesterday that Adobe has finally released a 64-bit plugin to play flash in Firefox. This should make the lives of a lot of 64-bit Linux users much easier. It also represents a bit of a turn-around in the relations between Adobe and the free-software community.

I’ve used 64-bit Ubuntu for a couple of years. The only two real problems that I’ve experienced were with Skype, which lacks a 64-bit Linux package, and playing flash in my web browser, since Adobe has traditionally refused to release 64-bit flash plugins for any platform. It’s easy enough to work around the Skype issue by using the 32-bit package, but flash was another story: an endlessly buggy wrapper, ‘npwrapper’, was required in order to use the 32-bit plugin on a 64-bit system.

In my experience, npwrapper would frequently and arbitrarily crash, leaving gray boxes where Flash content was supposed to be displayed. This was enormously frustrating, and despite many hours attempting to troubleshoot the problem, I never solved it. Instead, I’ve spent two years having to restart Firefox a few times a day in order to work around the crashing wrapper.

There are other flash plugins available besides Adobe’s, including the GNU project’s gnash player, but none of them has ever worked well enough to be usable. As much as I dislike proprietary software on philosophical grounds, I have to admit that Adobe’s closed-source player is still the only real option for most people.

Since installing the 64-bit plugin, I’ve had no problems. I’ve only used it for a day, but all of the flash-based sites that I’ve visited in that time have worked fine, and I’ve yet to be frustrated by finding an ugly gray box where a Youtube video is supposed to be. All in all, I’m very satisfied, and only wish that Adobe had released this new plugin a few weeks ago so that it could have been shipped standard with 64-bit Intrepid systems (for the time being, you have to install it manually; see the end of this post for instructions).

Political Implications

Also remarkable is the fact that Adobe decided to release a 64-bit flash plugin for Linux before one becomes available for Windows or OS X. According to Adobe’s site, “We chose Linux as our initial platform in response to numerous requests in our public Flash Player bug and issue management system.”

This represents a reversal in Adobe’s relations with Linux users (which it inherited with respect to flash when Adobe purchased Macromedia in 2005). Traditionally, the company’s refusal to release a 64-bit flash plugin engendered a great deal of antipathy within the free-software community, since many users were dissatisfied with the imperfect performance of the 32-bit wrapper and the dirty hacks that it involves. This bitterness is echoed in an online petition against Adobe/Macromedia.

I don’t think that the 64-bit plugin is going to make up entirely for years of mistrust between Adobe and Linux users—after all, the company remains adamant in its refusal to release its popular photo-editing and web-development software for the Linux platform, another source of resentment—but it certainly scores some points for Adobe.

The move also reflects the seriousness with which desktop Linux is taken even by companies deeply invested in proprietary software. The flash plugin is clearly for use on desktops, not servers, and thus reflects the increasing visibility of desktop Linux to software developers. That benefits all Linux users, whether they’re running 64-bit kernels or not.

Appendix

If you want to give the 64-bit plugin a try on Firefox (note that it’s still beta), run these commands. I can’t guarantee that they’ll work for you, but they do for me. Adobe has more detailed (although non-Ubuntu-specific) directions, although copying into ~/.mozilla/plugins, as Adobe instructs, didn’t work for me:

sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

tar -xzvf libflash*

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

Then restart Firefox.  If it doesn’t work and you want the old flash plugin back, type sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree.

WorksWithU Contributing Blogger Christopher Tozzi is a PhD student at a major U.S. university. Tozzi has extensive hands-on experience with Ubuntu Server Edition and Ubuntu Desktop Edition. WorksWithU is updated multiple times per week. Don’t miss a single post. Sign up for our RSS and Twitter feeds (available now) and newsletter (launching January 2009).