[Leaplist] adobe flash for Ubuntu

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sat, 9/27/08, Hank Lambert <hank at hanklambert.com> wrote:
> Thanks for clearing that up. I re-read the article, and the
> author does in fact state that Adobe doesn't have a plug-in
> rather than Flash altogether.

I haven't seen a Firefox/x86-64 plug-in for either Adobe
Acrobat or Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash.

I've always run Firefox/x86 under Fedora/x86-64 since Fedora
Core 3 x86-64.  Starting with Fedora 7 (or Fedora Core 6?),
Red Hat bundles both Fedora/x86-64 and Fedora/x86 under
/usr/lib, using a wrapper script that calls whatever is
installed, x86-64 first, then x86.  x86-64 is always installed
as long as GNOME is (for various support, as GNOME is x86-64).
As of Fedora 8 or 9 (cannot remember), XULRunner is separated
from Firefox, so it's now possibly to have GNOME installed
(with XULRunner x86-64) and Firefox/x86 (with XULRunner x86).
RHEL 4.7 and 5.2 x86-64 now also do the same

> That makes more sense. But he did state that, "Ubuntu users
> need to wrap the 32-bit flash in ndiswrapper so that it
> could work a 64-bit version of Ubuntu". That sentence
> confused me as, like you said,

Then he's never done it.  There is a Netscape/Firefox plug-in
wrapper that allegedly allows x86 plug-ins to execute under
x86-64.  I've tried it several times now, and always had
crashes.

> I thought that NDIS was specifically for using Windows
> drivers on network devices.

NDIS is a Windows driver interface.  There is a Linux kernel
module that can interface with NDIS v4 (and NDIS v3?) modules
for Windows, with varying success -- ndiswrapper.  But that's
for the kernel and network driver modules.

> Maybe he used ndiswrapper when he should have just stated
> wrapper?

He must have, or has never done it.

Last time I checked both XP and Vista, Microsoft ships an
IE/x86 in both XP x64 and Vista x64, not x86-64.  Both IE
and virtually all of MS Office is Win32-only, requires x86,
and executes under WoW (Win32 on Win64), non-native.

I.e., unlike in the Windows world, Microsoft ships a largely
x86 library set for their x86-64 releases, at least desktop.
In the Linux world, we ship a full, true x86-64 library set,
and then some distros offer a x86 library set, others offer
a chroot for x86, a few may even offer both now, etc...


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