Macromedia Flash Standalone Player for Linux Version 6

8 September 2005

Flash on Linux
I've been involved with projecting flash as part of a theatre production. At the time I ran Macromedia Flash MX 2004 on a windows computer, however would like to have been able to run it under Linux, especially as I had to install windows on one of my computers that was normally linux only.
See At the Theatre: Macromedia Flash MX 2004 on the Stage

There is a standalone player available from Macromedia on the Flash Player Download Page. It is only version 6 (whereas the other operating systems, and the browser plug-in are at version 7), but as Flash can export to older versions (and does so by default for compatibility reasons) that is not a problem here.

After downloading uncompressing and untarring the file, it installs OK. It does give a message:

NOTE: Macromedia Flash Player requires two font packages
to be installed, ttfonts and urw-fonts.

but doesn't give any more information. I can only assume that either they are included with Mandriva or that these were installed as part of the installation as it doesn't appear to have caused any problems.

After it was installed the program should be run by running gflashplayer, however this gave the error:
gflashplayer &
gflashplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This was erroring because of a missing library file. This file was found on rpmfind.net in the package:

libstdc++2.10-2.96-0.83mdk.i586

I downloaded the file, and installed it using:
rpm -i libstdc++2.10-2.96-0.83mdk.i586.rpm

After installing the library file the flashplayer could be launched by running gflashplayer on the command line (or it is possible to add it to the KMenu).

I can now run flash in full screen on my Linux Machine (CTRL-F).

All I need know is for Adobe (formally Macromedia) to create a version of the Flash developer software that runs on Linux. I'll not hold my breath just yet :-(

On a related thread OpenSource software developers are working on a free replacement gplflash. There is a very old version, but they hope to add support for the new flash format, although I think that's going to be several months away at least.
GPLFlash Website