Adobe Flash

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  For the general public
This page is part of the XO Support FAQ.     Support Index | Print This Page
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This page describes third-party software that does not meet the OLPC standards for software freedom. The use of such software is unsupported; OLPC does not endorse or encourage its use.

Adobe Flash is a Restricted Format. A free software player Gnash comes with each XO laptop, but does not work with all web pages, because not all web sites have taken care to make sure that Gnash works.

Adobe Flash Player is a proprietary player for Adobe Flash media. Adobe Flash Player plays a larger variety of Flash media than Gnash, but has license restrictions that prevent easy distribution. More information on Adobe Flash Player can be found on the Adobe Flash Player web site.

Overview

Adobe Flash Player can be added by laptop deployments by the deployment engineers, for all laptop models, subject to permission from Adobe.

Adobe Flash Player is not included in OLPC OS, used by supporters and volunteers, because of the restrictions on redistribution. But it can be added later. The steps to follow depend on the model of laptop:

  • XO-1 or XO-1.5, Adobe publish a compatible player themselves, so follow the installation instructions below to download the player from Adobe,
  • XO-1.75, negotiate with OLPC regarding the payment of Marvell license fees for the Vmeta hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding engine, then follow the instructions for XO-4,
  • XO-4, download and install the video drivers, and the player,

(On XO-4 OLPC has already included the Marvell license fees in the cost of an XO-4).

Installation on XO-1.75 and XO-4

  • download and install the video drivers,
  • copy the libflashplayer.so file provided by OLPC to the XO-1.75 or XO-4,
  • create a directory, type this:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
  • copy the plugin, type this:
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Installation

For XO-1 and XO-1.5 only.

To check which version is installed, visit the Adobe Flash Browser Version Test. This will show LNX if Adobe Flash Player is installed, or GSH if Gnash is installed.

On Browse activity, Flash media is not played immediately; click on the media to start playing. The Click to Play can be disabled.

Browse Activity

How to download and install Adobe Flash Player for the Browse Activity, on Sugar 0.82 and later:

  • Make sure the XO is connected to the Internet,
  • Start the Terminal Activity,
  • Enter the following commands:
su -l
wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/pdc/11.2.202.251/flash-plugin-11.2.202.251-release.i386.rpm
rpm -i flash-plugin-*.rpm
(this link is occasionally invalidated by Adobe, to find the current one go to get.adobe.com and complete the prompts.)
(to save typing, copy and paste the above commands from Browse activity to Terminal, like this: start Browse, visit this page, use the touchpad to highlight the wget and rpm commands, click the Edit menu in the Browse and click the Copy button, then in the Terminal, click the Edit menu and then click Paste.)
(to upgrade from an existing installation of flash-plugin, use rpm -U instead of rpm -i.)
  • Wait for the rpm command to complete. On XO-1.5 this may take a minute or so.
  • In releases prior to release 8.2.0, and in 11.2.0, to avoid conflicts between the Gnash and Adobe Flash plugins, remove Gnash with the following Terminal commands:
su -l
yum remove -y gnash gnash-plugin
  • Stop Terminal,
  • Stop Browse,
  • Start Browse, and check that Flash is working properly: open the page Adobe Flash Browser Version Test. The version should be LNX not GSH, indicating that Adobe Flash is handling the content.
  • If Flash did not work, now follow these steps:
 1. From Terminal type su - (this brings you to the root terminal). At the bash# prompt type:  yum -y install nspluginwrapper 
    Wait for it to complete.
 2. Now,at the bash, copy paste this:
    /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/npconfig -n -p nswrapper_32_32 -d /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins-wrapped -i /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so


The reply will just be the bash. But now if you open Browse and go to YouTube and click on a video, the flash player will work. Note that these instructions have been tested to work on Build 12.1.0 for the XO 1.5.

See hints on how to disable security questions popping up when using local content.

This installation must be repeated after any Update.

Firefox Browser (on GNOME)

Firefox is included in OLPC OS from 10.1.1 onwards, and is in the GNOME menus.

Installing Adobe Flash for the Browse Activity will also install it for Firefox. Start the Terminal application and enter the commands above. Then restart Firefox.

Opera Browser

For installing the Opera Browser, see the Main Opera Browser Page

Installing Adobe Flash for the Browse Activity will also install it for Opera.

Notes:

  • Alternatively, you can also use an installation script to install Adobe Flash v. 9.0.48.0 on your XO. However, this has not been thoroughly tested, and will not install the very latest version.

Firefox Activity (on Sugar 0.82)

For instructions on how to install Adobe Flash for the obsolete Firefox Activity, please go to Firefox/Obsolete.


  For Developers

Older versions of flash are available here: 

http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp9_archive.zip

Information about how to load other restricted formats is found here.

Click to Play

To automatically run Flash applets without seeing the Click to play prompt, move two files by typing the following in the Terminal Activity:

  • For current builds, i.e. 767 (aka release 8.2.0)
cd /home/olpc/Activities/Browse.activity
mkdir bak
mv agent-stylesheet.css bak/.
mv clickToView.xml bak/.
To undo using Terminal:
cd /home/olpc/Activities/Browse.activity/bak
cp agent-stylesheet.css ../.
cp clickToView.xml ../.
  • For Sugar-on-a-Stick builds, e.g. Blueberry v2 (aka Sugar 0.86.3)
cd /home/liveuser/Activities/Browse.activity
mkdir bak
mv agent-stylesheet.css bak/.
mv clickToView.xml bak/.
To undo using Terminal:
cd /home/liveuser/Activities/Browse.activity/bak
cp agent-stylesheet.css ../.
cp clickToView.xml ../.
  • For really old builds: (if this applies to you, you really should update!)
su -l
cd /usr/share/activities/Web.activity
mkdir bak
mv agent-stylesheet.css bak/.
mv clickToView.xml bak/.
To undo using Terminal:
su -l
cd /usr/share/activities/Web.activity/bak/
cp agent-stylesheet.css ../.
cp clickToView.xml ../.

Notes: In build 703 /usr/share/activities looks like it's moved to /home/olpc/Activities while in build 711 it looks like it's /home/olpc/Activities/Web.activity

NEWBIES (like me): This works like a charm to get rid of the double Flash elements on each page, but remember: text entered in the terminal is CaSe SEnsITiVe.

Uninstallation

Linux RPM removal: 

su -l
rpm -e flash-plugin
exit

Advanced options

  For Developers

Flash-heavy Sites

Note that media-rich and script-heavy Flash media can be very taxing on the CPU and may perform poorly.

The XO Browse Activity is loaded with Gnash, a Free and Open Source Software that is compatible with Flash 8. A number of sites, however, require at least Adobe Flash version 9 and higher running the newer Actionscript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) and Actionscript 3.0 code.

To successfully access sites that require Adobe Flash 9 and above:

  1. Close all Activities
  2. Ensure that the XO is connected to the internet
  3. Install Adobe Flash, and follow the advanced instructions to disable Click to Play
  4. optional: Disable Gnash
  5. Reboot the XO
  • Please note that a lot of websites such as popular children's sites Webkinz.com (Flash 9+ required) and Disney.com are generally geared towards systems that have a lot of free disk space for browser cache files. The XO only has a total storage of 1GB so be aware that successive use of these sites may quickly fill up your free storage.
  • Also note that the Browse and Firefox activities zoom-in pages by default to improve readability. Because of this, Flash applets are artificially scaled up above native resolution and the CPU is taxed even more because more pixels have to be rendered by Flash. Zooming out or using a browser that runs at native resolution like Opera will improve performance.
  • Additional performance increase at the sacrifice of visual quality may be gained by running Flash in low-quality mode. This may be achieved by right-clicking on the flash applet to access the context menu, then selecting QUALITY -> Low. Note that a lot of Flash applets disable the right-click context menu.

A forum thread at the following URL documents a workaround that will start the Adobe Flash plugin in low-quality mode by default: http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=845.msg7429 note that the guide was written with Flash 9 in mind and has been documented to crash the browser on Flash 10: http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=3804.0

Flash Video

Installing the latest version of Adobe Flash will allow users to run sites like Youtube.com and GoogleVideo.com and play Flash Video. Note however that decoding video is a CPU-intensive activity. Due to the XO's limited CPU, Flash Video will play at very low framerates. Sound in general will play at full speed. Running Flash in low-quality mode (detailed in the previous section) may improve Flash Video performance.

Flash 3D

3D in Flash is achieved via software rendering and is not hardware accelerated. Because of this, 3D in Flash is very CPU and memory-intensive, and the XO's limited 433MHz CPU and 256MB RAM may not be able to cope.

Visiting sites that use Flash 3D engines such as Papervision3D.org, the demo pages of FlashSandy.org and AlternativaPlatform.com may freeze the browser *AND* the entire machine thus requiring a reboot.

Because of this, avoid visiting sites which make use of 3D in Flash.

Webcam Support

Support for the XO's built-in camera seems to be problematic.

In both the Browse Activity and Opera browser:

  • Browsing Flash apps that use the webcam will turn on the indicator light above the webcam
  • Flash 9 shows just a black screen
  • Flash 10 shows red and green static which reacts to motion. This means the camera is working, but isn't talking quite correctly with Flash.
  • Tested on Update.1 711

More information may be found here: http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=3676.0

Gnash

See the Main Gnash Article.

Adobe Flash has been reported to conflict with Gnash before; but this has not been reproduced recently. If you have a site that works for you with Adobe Flash installed but not with both Adobe and Gnash installed, please describe this in detail on the talk page here (after doublechecking the version of flash your browser seems to be running).

With build 8.2.0 of the XO OS, Adobe Flash & Gnash generally co-exist peacefully, with the Adobe Flash plugin running in the browser and Gnash able to run outside the browser in stand-alone mode.

Some notes on Gnash:

  • Gnash 0.8.2 that comes with 711 has problems with AS-driven dynamic text rotation/positioning
  • Gnash 0.8.3 that comes with 8.20 builds the above problem, but still has some Adobe Flash 7 & 8 sound bug incompatibilities.

es:Adobe Flash

Issues with Adobe Flash

See the main article on issues with Adobe Flash.

Related Articles

  • Gnash the open source Flash player pre-installed with the XO
  • Adobe AIR on the OLPC XO
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