Posted on Dec 12, 2008 under sunray |
Once again I’m revisiting the state of Flash support running under Sun Ray software. My previous post showed there had been improvements made on this front. How are things doing over a year later?
My Sun Ray environment today is using Ubuntu Hardy and Flash 10 from the included flashplugin-nonfree package. I’m still using PulseAudio with a workaround by Sebastian Hesselbarth that nicely configures pulseaudio for each user and redirects sound through the appropriate $UTAUDIODEV device. No more libflashsupport dependency. With this in place, users launch the Sound configuration in GNOME and set all options to “PulseAudio Sound Server”, and it just works.
Unfortunately the smurfing effect has returned in Flash 10, having been temporarily fixed at one point in a Flash 9 beta. Someone filed a bug with Adobe recently about this, and it appears it is being investigated. Hopefully Adobe can fix this soon!
Posted on Oct 26, 2007 under sunray |
There have been some improvements on this front since my last post. Adobe’s pre-release flash player 9 update has the smurf effect color problem fixed, and Tobias Oetiker has made a libflashsupport patch that uses the $AUDIODEV environment variable. I have tested both of these on Ubuntu Feisty and Gibon and everything works as it should. My thanks to Adobe and Tobias for making the load averages on my Sun Ray servers increase.
Posted on Mar 11, 2007 under sunray |
I have a deployment of approximately 40 Sun Rays at work that serve as the primary desktops for our scientists. Currently these Sun Rays are powered by Sun servers running Debian Linux, although I intend to migrate over to Nexenta once key pieces of the desktop catch up. One key piece of software is the Adobe Flash player, which sits at version 7 for Solaris, and has just been upgraded to 9 on Linux. This means that all the websites which now require the latest version of Flash are once again accessible to my users. Unfortunately, Adobe has seen fit to only support ALSA, something that the Sun Ray audio library doesn’t support. Flash without audio support is kind of pointless, so I went looking for a solution.
I stumbled across PulseAudio which provides a modified version of Adobe’s libflashsupport library, enabling you to use ESD or PulseAudio. I am using ESD as an audio “bridge” for all applications that don’t honor $AUDIODEV by default, which include those based on gstreamer. By setting FLASH_FORCE_ESD=1 before launching firefox, I am getting sound in Flash on my Sun Rays. Now that sound is working, the only remaining Flash issue is what we call the smurf effect. This is a bug in Flash that needs to be addressed directly by Adobe.
I look forward to the day when Adobe recognizes [Open]Solaris as a viable desktop OS and releases an up-to-date version of Flash.
Edit: It looks like they have released a beta!
