Test-driving Adobe’s Flash Player 9 beta

The stable Flash Player plugin for Linux is crusty old version 7 — trailing more than two calendar years, two major revisions, and one corporate buyout behind the Windows and Mac offerings. But now Adobe has finally unveiled a beta release of Flash Player 9 for Linux. Was it worth the wait? And should you install it now, or hold off a little longer for the official, stable product instead?

The beta is available for download — without registration — from Adobe Labs. The downloads are ELF binaries for 32-bit x86 Linux exclusively, and require ALSA for audio. This time around, Adobe has supplied not only a Netscape Plugin-compatible browser plugin, but a standalone GTK player as well.

Both packages are simple gzipped tarballs containing the binary and a readme.txt file. To install the browser plugin, copy it to either your personal plugins folder (on Firefox and Mozilla Seamonkey this should be ~/.mozilla/plugins) or the system-wide plugins folder (typically /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/ or /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins). The standalone player will run from any location.

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