Dear Nokia: Flash 9 for Linux is final, ask Adobe to port it for the N800

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

• olly

  Stefan –

  I don’t own an internet tablet (yet, dammit!), but I DO run linux exclusively on the desktop… has anyone just tried to put the plugin file into Opera’s plugin folder and see what happens?

  For example, the plugin is a .so file (if I remember correctly). To add it to Firefox on a Linux box, you simply add it to ~/.firefox/plugins/ and voila, you have the plugin. Similarly, in Opera there is a plugins folder that you add it too…

  Do me a favor — download it and try it, see what happens. I’m not so sure that the plugin is architecture specific.

  -olly

• Stefan Constantinescu

  Yes the plugin is architecture specific. Why else would it say x86 in the download link

• John Dowdell

  Nokia has already licensed Adobe Flash Player for many of their other devices, mostly with the mobile Flash Lite profile. Folks I work with already want to provide these capabilities anywhere, any device… if you also let Nokia know what you’d like on the device then that’d help us push from both ends, thanks.

  jd/adobe

• Stefan Constantinescu

  The Internet tablets run a custom linux distro called Maemo: http://www.maemo.org/

  Are you saying that Adobe would have no problem porting Flash 9 to run on the Internet tablet? As long as Nokia is interested?

• John Dowdell

  “Are you saying that Adobe would have no problem porting Flash 9 to run on the Internet tablet?”

  No, I have no idea of the technical specs of that environment, so I would not be able to usefully comment about how much it might cost to engineer, test, and maintain.

  The device manufacturers themselves are the major stakeholders in the budgeting for any such work, though, which is why both partners need to see the potential benefits to prioritizing that work. Letting the device manufacturer know is the starting point.

• Stefan Constantinescu

  Thanks, looks like I’ll have to find out who to contact.

• Hub

  The Flash plugin is NOT portable. That is at least what Adobe engineer use as an excuse to not have a x86_64 bits version, but there is also not Linux/PPC version while there is a MacOS X/PPC version. Go figure. But they claim it is full of hand tuned assembly and things like that.

  On the other hand, Gnash is designed with portability in mind. If only it was backed out by just more than FSF and a handful of (talented) developers.