Very happy to see over at Penguin.swf that the folks from Adobe have released a beta of their Flash client for Linux. Wait, the Boston Globe Red Sox online videos now work? Make that exceedingly happy.
ESPN’s InMotion doesn’t appear to function properly – no big loss there – but at least I’m not getting that immensely frustrating “Please upgrade your client to Flash 8” message any longer. As ESPN demonstrates, there appear to be a handful of sites that present minor compatibility issues, but overall the player seems to be functioning more or less as expected for members of the Gentoo and Ubuntu communities. So far the most popular destination for newly equipped Linux Flash users seems to be SciFi.com’s Battlestar Gallactica site. No surprise there.
One quick note to Ubuntu users: following the installation instructions included with the player won’t work, you need instead to copy the libflashplayer.so file over to /usr/lib/firefox/plugins, restart Firefox and you should be all set. You can also drop it into the Mozilla directory and link to it from that directory as specified here.
Now if only I’d had this while the Sox were still playing…
