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Adobe has released an (update) beta of Flash Player 9 including versions for Linux and Vista.

The Linux release is reported to work for Fedora 6.

I couldn't get it to work completely (bad rendering and no sound) with the DR of Elive. Apparently, this flash beta will not work with ESD even if the proper ALSA libraries (libaound.so) are present and ESD uses ALSA.

The latest stable release of Simply Mepis also had no sound despite the use of ALSA but the rendering was much better.

Texstar, the maintainer of PCLinuxOS posted on the Adobe forums that he couldn't get it to work (both Firefox and Konqy crashed) with his distro. So I figured if he couldn't get it to work, I sure as hell couldn't.

--walt

Well, it seems that I stumbled upon a bug that affects how the Flash 9 beta works on the old linux box.

It's a Compaq Presario circa 2001 with an 900 MHz Athlon processor and 378 megs of RAM.

The box's motherboard has onboard sound (via 82C686A/B). Being who I am, I disabled it in the BIOS and used an audio PCI ES1370 SB-compatible card instead.

For some reason, the Flash 9 Beta refuses to work with the ES13710 even though Flash 7 did.

On a hunch, I re-enabled the onboard sound and LO and BEHOLD, Flash 9 has sound in Sabayon (Gentoo-based) with firefox 2.0 and even in Elive (Debian) if ALSA is used instead of ESD. Unfortunately, the rendering in Elive using firefox 1.5 is a bit wacky.

The beta also works in SimplyMepis which is Ubuntu-based.

As far as I know Texstar hasn't gotten it work with PCLinuxOS.

The Flash Player 9 beta for Vista, osX, and Linux is available at

For any of you flash developers out there, this site is so cool. It is a whole site dedicated to opensource flash stuff including a command line video encoder. Watch out for updates soon.