So I decided to try a little experiment and move some household computers over to Linux. Going into it, I figured there wouldn't be too many problems. The games played by my kids are, for the most part, online games developed in Flash. With Flash 10 now readily available for Linux on 32 and 64 bit machines, Linux would be on par with Windows Flash functionality.
With the computers now happily booting into Debian, I had one of my children log in to test it out. Wouldn't you know it, the latest online Flash-based game Disney's Pixie Hollow failed to load. Everything looks fine until you get a strange error message about it losing the login information.
After trying several different combinations of Firefox and other browsers I found a solution.
Solution:Use a Flash 9 version of the Linux plugin--not the latest Flash 10 plugin. From there, everything has worked fine.
On a 64 bit Linux install, this means running a 32-bit version of Firefox with the Flash 9 plugin. Running nspluginwrapper didn't work either, so I stuck with the 32 bit Firefox / Flash 9 combination.
To date, all the online Flash games play great and are indistinguishable from their Window's counterparts on the outside. Of course, I sleep better knowing what's driving the code.
Locating older versions of Flash to download was little tricky, so here is the link.
So far, no major complaints from the family on the migration. I still have a Windows machine for iTunes and a few other Windows games floating around. My goal will be to move that functionality to Wine or VirtualBox in the very near future.
1 comment:
Excellent info, thanks! Ubuntu is great, but a disappointed 4 year old girl is not so great.
Post a Comment