Linux, Flash and surfing the web.....

Evening everybody and Happy New year.

This is not so much of a question as an attempt to find out about peoples experience with the Linux Flash Plug-in.

There seems to be innumerable threads all over the web with people having problems with installing the plug-in. This mostly amounts to trouble installing on an x64 (64bit) distro. Just for the record, most users have solved this by installing the i386 version of their browser then installing the plug-in.

I have however experienced another major problem with Adobe's flash player:

In XP, Flash obviously works without any issues. I installed Flash on a clean install of XP from the link in a web page that required it (XP is run inside a VM). Although XP is slower at rendering pages (in my experience) than Linux, all the sites I visited displayed Flash content without a hiccup. My four year old daughter still has to use this to visit nick.com to play with Diego.

Then I tried the same sites on Fedora and Ubuntu and Firefox asked me, like XP, if I wanted to install Flash. Installation went fine on both but browsing is useless. I have manually reinstalled Flash on both systems and still have the same browsing problems. Numerous sites still tell me that a plug-in is missing. On clicking 'install missing plug-in' I am then informed that Flash is already installed. If it is already installed then why the bloody hell does it tell me that Flash is missing?

On top of this, why does Adobe provide Flash for Linux, and then not provide a Shockwave plug-in.

If it was just the nickjr site that was a problem then I wouldn't be worried. But I can't view 60% of the websites I visit. In Ecuador where I live, due to the "I want my PC to look like Reebok Trainers" culture every website is covered in Flash animations. Even my internet provider's Linux support page won't show because of Flash.

I thought it was just my system, so I have tried from four other machines including two cafenets and the problem is still there. So with all the great technology we have today, Linux can't even browse the net properly yet. Ballmer must be rolling around having a cardiac arrest from laughter.

So, where can you help? I am wanting other people to share their Flash problems in this thread. I would like web designers reading this to contemplate content provision methods for their sites (how many potential customers are you locking out.). If designers use the right creation tools, Flash can still be used on Linux to great effect.

And lastly........ can anyone explain, if there is no Shockwave player available for Linux, and lots of Flash sites don't work on Linux, how does my Nokia N800 display every web page I go to? (Maybe this could be a lead for the hackers?).

I hope this provokes a few thoughts that you will share with me, and maybe even a few solutions, even if that means alternative technologies to Flash, however good it is.

Thanks everybody.

Blame it on Macromedia I guess. I use Flash on my system (Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu) and have never had a problem with it. Maybe the problem could be that you have something installed that's causing this problem. Check your system for Gnash and remove it if you do have it installed. If not then try removing flash and installing Gnash.

I have used a fresh install of Fedora this week with no gnash. Still had the 'missing plug-in problem". Removed flash yesterday and tried gnash. It's certainly a lot quicker to load than Flash but the sites still don't see the plug-in. It also doesn't explain the problems at the cafenet.

As other sites seem to work I'm not sure if it's Flash or the programming of the website. I don't know much about web programming (I'm a C & Lisp man) but maybe they are using code specific to Windows creation packages. I'm thinking along the lines of some web browsers which struggle with Frontpage extensions etc.
Any web designers out there let us know!

Thanks for your quick response.

Have you tried Manually installing the flash plugin, rather than use the auto plugin finder?

Yeah, I've tried manually. In fact I install almost everything manually. What I have noticed today is that more sites run under Epiphany on XFCE than anything else on KDE or Gnome. I thought XFCE was based on the same tech as Gnome.