GNU Gnash For Linux

GNU Gnash is a Flash movie player. Till now it has been possible to play flash movies with proprietary software.

While there are a few free flash players, none supports anything higher than SWF v4 at best. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports many SWF v7 features.

To build Gnash, you currently need the Mozilla or Firefox development packages installed. I have added the basic Mozilla SDK files, so at least you don't need the full Mozilla/Firefox sources. You can tell if you have these packages installed, because either a firefox-config or mozilla-config should be present. If neither of these aren't present, the plugin won't be part of the build.

If these are present, then when you install the plugin, it gets installed in the plugin directory of the same firefox that's in your path.

You can also specify explicit paths to the Mozilla SDK by using the --with-firefox, --with-firefox-libraries, or --with-firefox-headers options at configure time. You'll also want the OpenGL development package and the SDL development packages installed as well.

Currently the plugin renders a hard coded OpenGL graphic in the allocated window within the browers. You'll have better luck with the standalone version, gnash. Development of the plugin is continuing, however, now that much of the basic creation of this new project is done.

I'm using the Mozilla plugin API, so although the functionality of the plugin is limited at this time, it has worked in a variety of different versions of Mozilla and Firefox.