[OT] Shockwave on Linux

[Richmond Mathewson]

Thanks, Bernard, for you suggestion; I have been running WINE on various 
machines
for the last 4 years, oddly enough as a way of testing Windows 
standalones from
Runtime Revolution stacks :)

Also one of my sons was mucking around with some silly free blackjack 
games for
Windows . . . Yuck!

However . . . the situation in my school is rather different as I deal 
mainly with 7 -12
year old children who do not have English as a native language, and 
belong to the
"attention-deficit-click-click-I-want-it-now" generation - and the main 
concern is
to stop them performing multiple clicks (because, let's face it, 2 
seconds is a lifetime,
isn't it . . . Ha, Ha, Ha) in funny places while something loads.

I am actually working with .swf files, which I, like many others, 
thought, wrongly,
meant that they were Shockwave files (just as, similarly, I thought that 
.dcr files
were Director files !!!!!!). There are quite a few ways to play these 
files on the
slow Pentium IIIs without invoking WINE (which really does hit them); 
the easiest
and lightest (in terms of RAM consumption) seems to be swfdec-gnome. Adobe
have released a Flash player for Linux, but it is full of needless 
eye-candy,
only seems to work with Ubuntu 8.04 up (and I run Ubuntu 5.04/5.10 in my
school), only works as a browser plug-in, and so on.

I have a handful of .swf files sitting inside a directory on the 
desktops and really
need that a double click on one of them loads them directly into 
something that
has an absolutely minimal interface (see comments above about the 
sticky-finger
brigade): swfdec-gnome does exactly that.

Now, my next problem is to see whether I can install swfdec-gnome downstairs
from a .tar file instead of hauling each Pentium box up and down the 
stairs to connect
to the internet and a bit of aptitude . . .

Runtime Revolution led me "astray" this morning when, possibly rather 
naively, I
imported a .swf file as a video file (well . . . it let me do it) and 
tried to play it as a
videoClip and ended up with a lot of 'spaghetti'. It would be jolly nice 
if one could
play them like this (think of the mysterious "Hypercard 3" which would have
allowed Hypercard stacks to be played in a Quicktime player and then 
stand things
on their heads). One could leverage the interactivity of .swf inside the 
interactivity
of Runtime Revolution :)

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.

Bernard Devlin wrote:
> Richmond,
>
> It looks like you might have solved your problem.  However, you may be
> pleasantly surprised by Wine.  There may well be circumstances in
> which it will provide a good solution.
>
> I run Lotus Notes under Wine on my Linux netbook, which has a
> relatively slow processor and only 512mb of RAM.  Yet Notes runs
> faster under Wine than on my much faster dual processor Vista laptop
> with 1gb of RAM (even with all of Vista's eye candy stripped out and
> all unnecessary services stopped).
>
> I realise that the Wine community is not able to tune their code for
> every Windows app, and Notes is probably one of those where they have
> spent considerable time getting it to work.
>
> But still, I was astonished to see what Wine can do.  Note to self:
> remember, Wine is not an emulator.
>
> Bernard
>
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 9:17 PM, Richmond Mathewson
> <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> However, the Shockwave
>> Player can be installed
>>                  on Linux with CrossOver or by running a Windows version of
>> a supported browser
>>                 in Wine (with varying degrees of success)."
>>
>> Which sounded really heavy and not at all suitable for my Pentium IIIs. As
>> well as involving too
>> much hard work on my part :)
>>
>>     
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