Submitted by “iXsystems announced an agreement with Adobe Systems that will allow the next version of PC-BSD to have a Flash-enabled browser available on a default installation. The Linux version of Adobe’s popular Flash player will run on PC-BSD using FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility layer.” In other news, snapshots of the development branch of PC-BSD are now available and built three times a week.
pc-bsd is on a roll! its nice to see the distro not as concernd about everything being open source so much as it just wants the whole package to work out the door. keep up the good work
wow that’s amazing!
That’s a big step forward for PC-BSD which aims to be a multimedial user friendly OS!
This is nice for PC-BSD, but I really wish Adobe would release a native Flash plugin for the *BSDs in general.
Is that even possible? For every BSD?
Perhaps by open-sourcing the whole crap, but that’s probably beyond reality….
Edited 2007-04-18 20:15
Sure, it’s possible. There are really only 3 major BSDs: Free, Open, and Net. And if you really want cover 99.99% of the BSD market, add in Dragonfly. I would think there would be a way to release a plugin that runs on all those BSDs.
If not, just release it for FreeBSD, since that appears to have the largest userbase. I’m sure some enterprising souls in the other BSD camps could figure out a way to get a FreeBSD Flash plugin to work on their operating systems.
So: Adobe could create a single Flash plugin that works on these BSD’s, or just release one for FreeBSD. Either one would be nice.
A better way would be to write the flash plugin using Java, so then it is truely compatible cross platform – one code base, many targets, its just a matter of bundling the plugin in the right packager.
This is nice for PC-BSD, but I really wish Adobe would release a native Flash plugin for the *BSDs in general.
Why?
There’s nothing wrong the the *BSDs linux compatibility layer. This is what it is for, to run the binary only junk that is targeted at Linux (which is has a much bigger *audience than the BSDs combined I’m afraid).
Its not like there is a noticable performance hit by using it. If you have an example of why a “native binary” would be useful, I’d like to hear it.
Then this means that all you’ll ever get is the linux compatibility layer, the term ‘layer’ may answer your question why.
If you have an example of why a “native binary” would be useful, I’d like to hear it.
Many:
– Better support for sound
– More stability
– Less memory and CPU usage
– Less space usage on the CD-ROM
– No hack found on the web to have browsers work seemlessly with the plugin
Using the Linux Compat is no fun at all.
Why? Are you serious? Because using Flash with the Linux compatibility layer, frankly, sucks. It’s a hack. The Flash Plugin 7 works ok with Opera, but frequently crashes with Firefox and other browsers. And Flash 9 doesn’t really work at all on any browser. Just cruise over to bsdforums.org and check out the many posts about Flash problems.
Most people don’t like the thought intalling half of a Linux system just because of a Flash plugin.
Now please, PLEASE include an installar that automatically configures a dual-boot machine, a lá Ubuntu!
Edited 2007-04-18 20:00
Isn’t that the truth, I’ve never had a harder time getting a dual boot system going then with PCBSD. I barely got one going now with Feisty and PCBSD, and only because Grub rocks so much it’ll boot just about anything
I barely got one going now with Feisty and PCBSD, and only because Grub rocks so much it’ll boot just about anything
I had nothing but troubles dualbooting anything with GRUB. FreeBSD bootloader does not need any configuration- it can boot Windows XP, Vista, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD and Other BSDs without any problem. All problems Linux users encounter is due to nonstandard disk layout(ala MS-DOS primary+extended mess)- admit that 3 primary and 6 extended partitions is lame. FreeBSD/PC-BSD needs only ONE PRIMARY PARTITION(slice in FreeBSD terminology) and all other partitions are created inside that one.
My advice to everyone is to get Gag. Gag just works. You just need to create a floppy disc from which you will install GAG on your system. After that, you don’t need to read any instructions, just browse through the menus and setup what you need.
I managed to get PC-BSD dual booting no problem. Though I had a partition all ready to go. Automatic would be great but I really don’t mind going through the minimual effort of telling the install which partition it needs to use.
If you install PCBSD after Ubuntu AND install bsd boot loader, it will boot any OS which is on any primary partition.
if you install Ubuntu after PCBSD and install grub, you will have to discover magic of google (or yahoo or gentoo wiki).
Thing is , its not the pcbsd that aint ‘ubuntu-friendly’. It is Ubuntu, which aint ‘bsd-friendly’.
I know flash 7 is pretty stable on BSD, but flash 9 is a pain. If they can get the latest version of flash stable that would be great.
Congrats to the PC-BSD team! Its great to see that they are making progress towards an easy to use multimedia OS. I tried PC-BSD a while back and didn’t find it quite ready for prime-time yet, but I’ll be giving it another shot as soon as I get the chance.
May be good news for PCBSD but for the opensource community in general, its not great news.
What we need is a native BSD Flash and as much attention to Flash for F/OSS OS’s as they award for Windows/Mac.
It’s better than nothing, it’s one more step ahead
We can imagine these tiny steps drive more folks to open-source systems, and more attention from Adobe considering these more and more interesting from a market stand point.
Strong market demand is the only argument they hear. Remember, they weren’t even going to support Linux and that entire team consists of 4 people (one of them being management).
Since you can download the plugin in firefox in seconds, even in Windows you have to. Seems to me they got half the cake and ate it.
Not everybody uses Firefox (I don’t). And this functionality doesn’t work on Firefox in PC-BSD. If you click “Download plugin” it tried searching and returns an error message saying it wasn’t able to download the plugin. Everything working out of the box is better than having to download and install stuff separately.
Thats because BSD is not supported, if they forced Adobe to do a native one it would. The fact is that people will have to download plugins anyway for media ans no OS does that out of the box.
If media used a format that every OS can use i.e OGG is free then it would be great but flash out the box is hardly ground breaking.
If BSD was Linux, iX systems would have been called traitors for this. Fortunately BSD is not Linux.
That why BSD is free and open software licence, when GPLed softs has opened only source code ;]
Edited 2007-04-18 22:30
Yes of course, but we don’t have any religion to worship in BSD. So faith is for Linux and therefore critics too.
Ehm and by the way, you can get in Debian too with non-free sources from Debian itself or in ArchLinux. You should really do your homework.
In viewing the FreeBSD advocacy list today, I see Matt Olander’s post there as well. It turns out this agreement is for PC-BSD and FreeBSD and it covers Flash 7 and 9. Again, nothing native, but maybe this is a step in the right direction.
Here is the start of the thread:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2007-April/0031…
Matt mentions Flash 7 and 9 in his second post.
In about a year, PC-BSD coupled with a stable version of KDE 4 (say 4.1 or so) should be a really nice desktop.
This is great news but don’t get soft about continuing the pressure on the big companies for native software.
Go PC-BSD!
why not just use GNU instead of some BSD?
Thank you PCBSD and Adobe, I’m waiting for native Flash Player 9.0 ported to FreeBSD too