On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 20:55 +0100, Gavin McCullagh wrote: > On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Dominic Webb wrote: > > > Is there anything that can be done to 'optimise' the use of (Macromedia) > > Flash on an LTSP network. > > It's a very awkward problem so long as we don't have a fully capable > open source flash plugin. If that were available, things might be a lot > more feasible. Yes an OS flash plugin would be great. However a lot of the content that we are seeing being used just wont work in anything other than the Adobe player. > > If you find that flash player is causing you a lot of problems, there might > be some benefit to be had from installing flashblock for firefox. This > will stop flash applets from opening by default. The user then gets an > icon which they can click on to make the flash open. So, flash doesn't > load every time there is a flash advert, but it can be opened by the user > for something like watching google video. > > http://flashblock.mozdev.org/ > I use this myself. Its a great little ext. However general browsing is not an issue. Its fully fledged curriculum content e.g. http://riverdeep-learning.co.uk . Youtube/Google Vids and other such sites have a similar effect, though shorter videos seem to be less of an issue.
> > A typical browser based instance of Flash is not the biggest resource > > hog in the world but it can become disproportionate when dealing with, > > say, interactive multimedia content. > > Do you mean CPU time, RAM, network bandwidth or all of the above? I have > considered limiting the bandwidth a client uses to stop it from over-using > the network due to streaming large animations, sound, etc. to the thin > client. One could perhaps do this with iptables on the thin clients. > Bandwidth isnt really an issue its the CPU utilisation that increases and stays at a disproportionately high level, compared to other applications. On the server RAM side we always allocate slightly higher than suggested amounts of RAM per thin client session, so I don't know if less/low amounts of RAM is an issue. Is it? > > If not (i.e. the only answer is more hardware) is this an area (software > > wise) that merits looking into? > > I imagine one contribution would be to work on the gnash project. A > working gnash would be a really big step forward for many reasons (it would > be possible to package it on the cdrom, it would work better with Jack/ESD, > it could be made leaner, the community could fix bugs, etc...). > > http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ > I have seen the project but I come back to the same questions about 'when' we could use it, that I ask myself with so many FLOSS projects/apps. 1. What needs to be done to bring it upto the same or near comparable level as the Adobe player 2. What resources does the project lack that we could look to provide We have a finite number of projects that we can have on the go internally and outsourcing is something I'm really happy doing on extra projects, its just who do I outsource the project to and what is it we are asking to be coded? If someone puts a proposal together that will result in us being able to remove our dependency on the Adobe Flash player then I'll put (financial) resources to it. Dom > Gavin > -- edubuntu-devel mailing list edubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
