BSD: August 2007 Archives

I was interviewed by Geek Entertainment TV at Linux World - you can check it out here. I'm on about 1/3 of the way through.

I was completely frozen up and nervous the entire time. Matt/Denise put me in front of the camera, and 5 seconds later it was on - despite my protests. You can tell how nervous I am (and how much of a ditz I am). Regardless, it was kind of amusing. She totally played with my tail. :P

It's been quite a while since I wrote a post about getting flash working under firefox in FreeBSD. It's gotten fairly popular, but I've also gotten a lot of emails and comments telling me that it was out of date. I hadn't set up flash on my computer at home yet, so I just went through the steps and revised them a little.

linuxpluginwrapper will prompt you with a config menu for multimedia/linux-realplayer and print/acroread7 support. I suggest not enabling acroread - as of mid 2006, linuxpluginwrapper was having some issues with unresolved symbols. It appears this is still the case.

# cd /usr/ports/www/linuxpluginwrapper
# make install clean

If you try to compile linuxpluginwrapper with acroread support, you'll get something like this when you try to use it later:

LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/ENU/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so [/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/ENU/Browser/ intellinux/nppdf.so: Undefined symbol "__ctype_b_loc"]

rltd has to be patched if we want any chance of getting flash7 to work properly.

# cd /usr/src
# fetch -o - http://people.freebsd.org/~nork/rtld_dlsym_hack.diff | patch
# cd libexec/rtld-elf
# make clean && make && make install

Install www/linux-flashplayer7. Do not use flashplugin-mozilla.

# cd /usr/ports/www/linux-flashplayer7
# make install clean

Although linuxpluginwrapper does supply an example libmap.conf, it's old. I mean, just look at the version number. 2005? I'm going to assume that you actually bother to run somewhat updated software, so here's a libmap.conf that will work with the prefix change for X.Org when we bumped major versions.

# My sample /etc/libmap.conf
# Flash 7 with Mozilla/Firefox
[/usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so]
libpthread.so.0 libpthread.so.2
libdl.so.2 pluginwrapper/flash7.so
libz.so.1 libz.so.3
libm.so.6 libm.so.4
libc.so.6 pluginwrapper/flash7.so
# Helix RealPlayer
[/usr/local/lib/linux-mozilla/plugins/nphelix.so]
libstdc++.so.5 libstdc++.so.5
libc.so.6 pluginwrapper/realplayer.so
libm.so.6 libm.so.4
libgcc_s.so.1 pluginwrapper/realplayer.so


We're almost done. Create a symlink for the flash player.

# ln -s /usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/local/lib/browser_linux_plugins/