Gnash, the free Flash player, makes progress

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britneysimpson

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Jul 4, 2006, 8:24:42 PM7/4/06

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Gnash, the free Flash player, makes progress
Wednesday June 28, 2006 (05:00 PM GMT)
By: Bruce Byfield

The Gnash project has been developing a free software Flash player
since December. Filling one of the last major gaps on the GNU/Linux
desktop, it is one of the Free Software Foundation's high-priority
projects. We covered the project several months ago, when compiling the
code was problematic. Now that Gnash has reached the 0.7.1 version, the
player is still rough, but enough has been done to give us an
indication of what the final version might be like.

Rob Savoye, the project administrator, explains that Gnash was
originally based on GameSWF, a similar project. However, he stresses
that, "in it's current form, it's a new project. A lot of portability
issues have been solved, so Gnash now builds and runs on many more
GNU/Linux distributions and BSD variants, including 64-bit systems.
This has brought Flash abilities to platforms that had none."

Much of the initial work, Savoye says, revolved around dealing with
threading issues with Firefox, X11, and OpenGL, which Gnash uses for
rendering graphics. The combination, he says, "gets really interesting
when you have multiple threads rendering different Flash movies into
differ sub-windows at the same time, and then throw OpenGL into the
mix."

In its current form, Gnash consists of a desktop Flash player and
separate browser plugins for Firefox and Konqueror. Those interested in
trying Gnash can compile from source, or use the .deb packages in
Debian experimental or the .rpm packages build for Fedora Core and Red
Hat versions 1-4. The desktop player requires GTK, but, otherwise,
Gnash depends on just two unique libraries, so dependency issues are
unlikely on most modern desktop installations. However, users may need
to uninstall a non-free Adobe Flash player in order to test the Firefox
browser plugin.

Gnash 0.7.1 is supposed to support small sound clips, but not sound
streams -- that is, continuously running sound. On my two test
machines, no sound worked whatsoever with either the player or the
browser plugin. That was true whether Gnash was compiled from source or
installed using one of the prepared sets of packages. According to the
project mailing list, the developers' attention is just turning to
sound support. They now plan sound support based on gstream -- but,
meanwhile, it does not seem worth trying to get even small clips to
work.