linux gets flashy

February 7, 2007 under Beryl, Flash, Linux, Ubuntu

Last night while updating some Firefox extensions in my Ubuntu virtual machine, I decided to try an experiment. The recently released Flash Player 9 also has a version for Linux. The last version for Linux was version 7, which made sites like YouTube unusable. And installing Flash 7 player on Linux was never a treat, regardless of which Linux distribution you were using. You couldn’t even install Flash via Firefox’s plug-in finder feature. However, when I visited YouTube last night, Firefox’s plug-in finder successfully installed Flash Player 9 and everything worked flawlessly.

To digress a bit, take a look at the latest version of Beryl in action. Beryl provides hardware-accelerated usability enhancements like the ones found in Mac OS X and Windows Vista. The difference is that Beryl (as well as Linux) is free, requires far less hardware resources than OS X and Vista, and the project is barely six-months old.

All of this is pointing toward Linux becoming a viable operating system for home use – it still has a ways to go on the corporate desktop. For our home computers, I’m seriously considering a switch…if my wife will let me 😉

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