Penguin.SWF

Yes, there _are_ so many ways of doing XYZ, but for each and every time you come across XYZ please feel free to ask around, or elsewhere (but let us know where).

Yes you will get a thousand posts demanding flash 9 now, but maybe there is a 'best easiest way' to do XYZ that someone with a different set of experiences than you knows about.

If this blog cannot get you response back quick enough, maybe something like a mailing list or IRC would help?

Anyways, I'm sure there are a lot of people with many different skills willing to lend assistance in way of consulting and advice if they can't touch the actual code.

Oh, and do not lose faith in the gentoo ;)

How did Gentoo fail you? OS X or Windows, really? Just use something less insane, such as Debian.
Although you told us there were problems, you didn't tell us specically what types of problems. Do you have questions about how to do something with Linux? Something we can help you with?

"My favored Linux distribution -- which I previously claimed rarely fails me -- failed me. I may need to shop around for another distribution soon (perhaps along the lines of Mac OS X or Windows)."

failed you how, and .. I seriously doubt windows is gonna fail less on you than a linux distribution after it's set up.

In my experience atleast, linux distributions are troublesome before they are set up and running, and windows is troublesome after it's set up and running.

As I had read earlier, you used Gentoo if I'm not mistaken. What exactly failed you?

There's a wealth of Gentoo enthusiasts who'd be more than happy to assist you if it's anything related to Gentoo & Linux.

One other question comes to mind - Is an alpha/prealpha release possible? Even with massive crashing, I'd love to see the new flash player & av sync. Switching between versions is not exactly a difficult thing to do for us, and I for one promise not to complain about crashing until the official release.

If a public alpha is out of the question, what about selective testing among the community?

That's too bad that the linux flash player client is crashing. So far, the main positive thing I'm seeing is good audio/video sync, it's very unfortunate that it seems as if the linux player is, again, falling behind drastically. 20-30% of the content I try and look at says I need at least flash player 8(9), this is very annoying. What are you currently having trouble with?

Thanks for keeping us up to date, I hope to hear more!

Good to hear from you again. It would be *very* helpful to know some specific details about your problems with missing standards on Linux. As you know, there are some projects on the way with regard to standardization (LSB, Portland Project), I am sure, the Free Standards Group and the OSDL would be glad to get some feedback on this problems.

And as a lawyer, I read from "Adobe isn’t open sourcing the Player at this time." that Adobe might open source the Flash player at a later time then :-)

To be sure, it's not that Linux can't do XYZ, it's that there are so many ways to do XYZ.

That's why Adobe MUST open source the player, or hire someone who knows a lot more about APIs for linux than you do (nothing against you, it's a fact, you don't know much about linux's APIs :)

Debian or Ubuntu makes the best development or server distribution. I used to have to manage a Gentoo server which would constantly break for various reasons. New upstream versions. Broken library compatabilities. You name it.

What XYZ's are those?

Perhaps you should post which APIs you're having trouble finding a standard for in Linux. Adobe may not open source Flash, but perhaps the community could help with some code advice.

I know a lot of people are eager for a decent Flash player on Linux, and I'm sure you'd get plenty of good technical suggestions.

So just to spell it out, does this mean you are abandoning the project? Does this mean Flash 9 for Linux will not happen?

I'm not really worried if Adobe releases another Flash plugin or not. There's always projects like Gnash which aim to provide the same functionality.

Check out Novell SLED 10 (SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). It's amazing (http://www.novell.com/linux)! I hope it works out for you with regard to your Linux development efforts.

Cheers!
Chuck

Sorry to hear about your trouble, and I hope you still will press on - we Linux users really appreciate that work is being done here.

Actually, didn't mean to sound harsh, just got worried. Hang in there man!! We all have our bad days.

Well, it certainly is good to hear that a lot of the new features are in there. Bug squashing is always fun!

The title of your post scares me. Could/would you venture a guess as to how far you've gotten along - 50%, 60%, etc? I know "it's Adobe's policy not to speculate..and so on", but I'm asking for your personal feeling, not any hard statistics or any kind of time frame.

Thanks for maintaining this blog - at least we know *something's* happening (even if it isn't good ;) ).

I write quickly before the bunch starts screaming for blood :)

About the ammount of options and features, have you tought about using a wrapper library, like SDL? It's LGPL so it wouldn't in theory force you to open source the player, only those changes if any you make to SDL, it is possible to include SDL with the player (some do it, like PlaneShift). or require people to install SDL in their distro (it's available in most) and it would offer a homogeneous interface to several backends for the task that are already part of the library.

im glad you guys are doing this but you are making it too hard on yourself. if there are a dozen ways to do xyz then just pick one and we can adapt. better idea. do what google is doing and just wrap it in wine. i run flash 9 on linux just fine with wine and the windows firefox installed.

Please define "XYZ".

Keep up the good work!

If you would like to try a new distro, why not try Ubuntu?
Maybe you just need more help. Im suprised that A large company like adobe doesnt have 50-100 people working on this.

Mike, ubuntu is a good choice. It is the most popular desktop Linux distro at this time, it's very stable, easy to install, easy configure and easy use. Maybe this will help you spend less time worrying about your distro, and more time developing.

Luckily Gnash is provided by people who know lots about the Linux API's. However, it's also only going to support Flash 7 and is *not* in a state for normal people to use.

Just wanted to mention: Open Source Flash! Proprietary formats are so 90's! ;-)
(I know you already addressed that concern, but it wont hurt to repeat the point).

*If* you're allowed to post what problems you're having, then let us know and no doubt the community can help. Doesn't sound like the project is over (although you'd think so from the digg.com article I just read) just that you're having a few problems.

As the FLOSS tenet goes: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."