Re: NetBSD vs. FreeBSD

["Pouya D. Tafti" <p.d.tafti%gmail.com@localhost>]

[Steven M. Bellovin]
> | For many things, gnash works well, though I've occasionally had to kill
> | it manually when it hung my browser.  However, it doesn't handle the
> | newer versions of flash, and more and more videos won't play with gnash.
>

[Alex Goncharov]
> For reference, how the problem was solved in FreeBSD:
>
> * Flash 7 had been supported for a long time through a linux flash
>  plugin (but I found gnash to be working better).
>
>  (I don't know if NetBSD allows to run Linux binaries.)
>
> * Which was not much good: most sites are running Flash 9 these days,
>  so, the desire for Flash 9 had been very strong.
>
> * About four months ago `linux-flashplugin-9' was added to the ports
>  tree -- and the sound of cheer was overwhelming :-)
>
>  It works perfectly (still with no sound, though, if I am not
>  mistaken) in opera and linux-opera.
>
> In any case, Flash 7 is practically "no Flush" these days, by common
> opinion on FreeBSD lists (which I definitely share).

NetBSD can also run Linux binaries.  On my NetBSD/amd64 -current
system I use ns-flash-9.0.124 from pkgsrc with a pre-release version
of Opera 10.00 in Linux compatibility mode (not from pkgsrc; pkgsrc
Opera also works though).  I have had to manually kill Opera's plugin
wrapper (operapluginwrapper) at times, but overall I would say that
this combination works relatively well (sound works too).

I briefly tried to get version 10 of Adobe's Flash plugin for Linux to
work in compatibility mode, but AFAICR it depended on some libraries
that were not included in pkgsrc's Linux compat libraries (those
packages seem somewhat old BTW, although this was virtually the only
instance I ran into problems because of this).

-- 
Pouya D. Tafti