Flash 9 (WINE) on FreeBSD, finally

[18Googol2]

A couple of days ago, I attempted to view some photos on Google StreetView but I realised they use Flash instead of SVG like Google Maps. Frustrated, then I came up with the idea of running Opera portable version with Wine.

I was using Opera portable exclusively when I hadnt migrated to the BSD world. Its a complete package; it contains mail, personal settings...and plugins. So I thought, sounds very "Wine friendly" and why dont I give it a try.

Unfortunately, its very slow on Google StreetView (I guess because there are too many Flash "actions" and it slows down the Wine rendering), but for videos, it works!

Experiences videos with Flash 9:

- No audio sync issue.

- Minor lagging (but I do experience the lag on Flash 7, so pretty sure its because of my 1.2Ghz Pen M cpu. It would be very smooth on powerful CPUs).

- No freezing problem, you will feel like running another browser. The wine processes take less than 50% cpu usage

19953 gu            9  96    0   103M 65316K select   1:37 46.73% wine-pthread
29185 root          1 107    0   199M 34948K RUN     88:42 21.53% Xorg
41337 gu            1 105    0   250M   169M select 623:10 17.48% opera
19955 gu            1   4    0  4380K  2628K kqread   0:07  1.07% wineserver

Screenshot

So the verdict is, its very usable.

Ok, so here is the howto

0. Download Opera portable

http://www.opera-usb.com/download.htm

(The version I use is 9.27. If you downloaded 9.5 and it doesnt work, try the older one)

1. Install Wine, of course

2. Lauch Opera with wine

Note: the file to run is Op.com, not operausb.exe

%wine /opera/path/Op.com

3. Check plugin path by enter the following line into the address box:

opera:config#UserPrefs|PluginPath

Should be "program/plugins" dir

4. Copy the 2 Flash 9 files into the plugin directory:

NPSWF32.dll
flashplayer.xpt

They can be extracted from another Windows machine or you can download here:

http://asternix.org/misc/Flash9.zip

5. That is. Restart Opera and enjoy!