Flash Player 9.0r115 and Opera for Linux

Recently the flash player got updated to version 9.0r115 in Ubuntu. I already had the debug version of 9.0r115 setup thanks to installing Flex Builder for Linux alpha so I didn't actually need it but downloaded it anyway. This broke flash for Opera since 9.25 doesn't work with the newest flash player( 9.50 beta does but I prefer to work with a stable version on this computer ).

For those of you wondering about the workaround/fix, here it is:
Download the 9.0r48 flash player from Adobe's self service page.

Then follow the instructions on ignoring plugins available here.

Just make sure to use the full path for the 9.0r115 plugin(s) you have available.

Silverlight's official launch

A couple weeks ago I tried to install Silverlight in Opera to no avail. Little did I know that the official launch hadn't occured yet. I see that today was the Official launch of Silverlight from Microsoft. The cool news is that there are plans for a linux version of Silverlight. The bad news, it still doesn't work in Opera. ...

Okay, so by cross browser compatible they mean that there is support for the main browsers that compete with them on Mac and PC. The ( currently ) tertiary competitor still doesn't work, let alone have support.

Thinking this might have been a version thing I tried to install it in the Alpha version of Opera 9.5, codenamed Kestrel. Faster browser :), same results.

Beyond the world of creating rich internet applications for work I am also an avid wrestling fan. I have constantly thought on the idea of a flash/flex based player for the WWE pay-per-views and weekly programming. Low and behold, the silverlight page has WWE right there as one of the examples. I obviously couldn't check it out in Opera so I had to hit my view in firefox button and check out WWE's silverlight launch page. Honestly, I saw this coming. Hopefully it will work better than having to watch a pay per view in the Windows Media Player ( upgrading if you haven't in a long time and missing hours of the show to technical issues :irked: ).

It will be interesting to see what happens with Silverlight. With Microsoft, it obviously has a whole lot of weight behind it. Do we really need another entrant into the field of rich media/rich application development? Will this crush flash( which works fine in Opera )? I'm amazed at some of the people putting their large eggs into the Silverlight basket. That will make a big difference in the short term.

Making Opera Work on Linux

Last week I switched to using Linux( Fedora Core 6 ) as my main operating system. One of my setup parameters was to use Opera for my browser, because I loved it on Windows. My first hurdle was dns resolution. DNS was taking too long to resolve. As it turns out, my linux install was still looking for IPv6 addresses and once I got that turned off DNS starting working quite well. Next on my list was Flash Player 9. As a flash developer and code czar, this was a necessity. Everything I currently make is in Flash 8 and there is no such thing as flash player 8 for Linux. This was actually very easy, so nothing to see here. A new issue is cropping up more and more though. Opera just becomes unresponsive. It will just stop working and the only thing to do is force quit. This is definately linked to specific pages but I haven't done enough research into why. One ironic twist is that when I search 'linux opera unresponive' at http://my.opera.com/community/forums it becomes unresponsive when I scroll down the list about half way. I like the Opera browser enough to attempt to find solutions but if I can't find any soon I may have to go back to firefox and start using plug-ins to make it work like opera. Of course, then I'll have to transfer all my mail into thunderbird or evolution and I'm not looking forward to that*.

If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear from you.

^{* I guess I don't HAVE TO but we'll see}