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Flash on Ubuntu PPC







Flash on my iBook G4 (Ubuntu 8.10 ppc)




You know what would be great? Having skype and youtube um work... Ok to be fair youtube kinda works unless I want to show people something - in which case it will ALWAYS fail miserably. So I want better flash for youtube...  and after extensive looking into skype:
  1. pidgoen plugins (that needed skype running duh)
  2. emulation with a virtual os - might look back into puppy linux just had some proxy annoyances
  3. qemu user-mode looks promising - will definatly look into this further.
  4. even looked into reverse engineering the protocol (don't even bother btw, seriously scary trying to debug that program).
So what I came up with is that imo.im is the answer... its actually as easy as visiting that address and logging in - online solution works for me! :-P
BUT... although I can now text chat to people on skype - to make calls and have video I need far better flash support. Does this exist for the ppc gnu/linux user?

So I really want decent flash support on my iBook - is that really so much to ask? After looking through Adobe Labs and system settings it appears they make support (make binaries for):



  • Any thing windows xp (or higher) can run on.



  • Any operating system of x86 architecture
  • Any intel based macs (gnu/linux or osx)
  • ppc based macs running osx

And most certainly not ppc based macs running gnu/linux... how unexpected!
So there are two things to investigate from here:
  • swfdec - which I have from ubuntu repositories
  • gnash (devsite)- which I also have from repos but am about to install from source.

Gnash from source on ubuntu

Get bzr

sudo apt-get install bzr

Get the source


bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/gnash/trunk gnash

Follow the build instructions

./autogen.sh

./configure --enable-gui=gtk

sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-thread-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libagg-dev libboost-date-time-dev dejagnu swftools csound (and whatever else configure asks for...)

./configure --enable-gui=gtk


./configure --enable-gui=gtk --with-boost-incl=/usr/include/boost

Repeat untill it stops whining... This was a while in my case... but after resolving the dependencies then manually specifying the boost include directory we get a make file! Might as well run that:

make

This took a long long time on my ppc...  but eventually the usual:
sudo make install
to finish up.

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