David Looney wrote:
Just untar the installation tarball and copy libflashplayer.so and
flashplayer.xpt to your ~/.mozilla/plugins directory.
It's a brain-dead installer. The i386 flash works fine under x86_64.
.... only if your browser is compiled for i386. You can't link an i386
shared library with an x86_64 executable. They're binary-incompatible in
the same execution space. It'd be the same thing on ia64 -- it can also
run i386 code (ok, it's miserably slow), but not in the same execution
thread as a native ia64 binary. You might as well be trying to link in
PPC or SPARC[1] code instead :(
Personally, I think these vendors asking us to run 32 bit browsers on a
64 bit platform is about like them asking us to take our ferrari and
putting the engine from a Yugo in it. It's unreasonable, and on the AMD
platform, results in a significant performance impact. I refuse to do
it. Push back on Adobe and Sun for real, usable plugins for 64 bit
Linux. Adobe doesn't supply it out of sheer stupidity on the development
side (I'm convinced) and Sun ... well, I don't know what their excuse
is, but Blackdown seems to have gotten it to work[2]. It's not that
difficult to port code to x86_64 -- I don't know what the hell is
stopping them from releasing a decent 64 bit executable.
I guess the moral of the story is that proprietary software sucks.
Especially flash, because it's stupid. Java isn't so much proprietary as
it is a pain in the ass (as you can get the source code -- i suppose i
could try compiling the plugin for x86_64 myself), and by now there may
be a GCJ-embedded Java browser plugin. I haven't looked.
Either way, I chalk it up to stupidity. There isn't a valid reason for
it, except, "waaaah, I didn't write portable code!" Never assume i386 is
going to be the only thing your code will run on. i386 could disappear
tomorrow and your code needs to be able to handle it.
I don't know, maybe I just have no tolerance for stupidity anymore.
-Kelsey
[1] SPARC 32 bit executables actually run faster than their 64 bit
counterparts in most of cases. Only the kernel and things that do a lot
of floating point calculations or otherwise require the 64-bit
extensions use them. Again, 32-bit SPARC code won't run in a 64-bit
execution thread either.
[2] www.blackdown.org; however, their plugin only supports up to 1.4.2,
and with recent versions of Firefox this causes the browser to bail when
it tries to load the java plugin. :(
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