Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Java & Sun/Oracle Blaze The Way :)

I never thought that I would such high marks to anything related to Java, but as it stands right now this is the only piece of the puzzle working natively and well on 64bit Firefox 4.0. I wanted to draw myself a picture of the pieces (below) so that I could work out in my head how this will all work. There are 4 main areas where I need to run embedded plugins based on our users requirements. 4 of the 5 plugins have caveats and are not deployed in the clean manner that I would like. Some of them are still only 32 bit, some of them don't natively use PULSE and some of them are missing features when built natively 64bit.

Green indicates satisfactory techniques, red indicates problems.



I guess for now we tell our parents and grandma to keep installing the 32bit flavors.

10 comments:

Chris said...

It's better not to refer to women as being technically-clueless people. Grandparents (or even grandfather!) would be better. :)

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/So_simple,_your_mother_could_do_it

Unknown said...

thankfully the issue around PDF readers is pretty good now: poppler does things like forms and what not, and i simply do not find PDFs which do not render in Okular these days. (fairly magical, that :)

firefox can embed Okular (with the right extension, which hopefully your distro is providing out of the box) and Okular works just fine in 64 bit.

(and i assume that evince can do the same trick as far as embedding into firefox? if not, well, use okular :)

so one problem caused by proprietary software in your graph is solved neatly right there.

Anonymous said...

moonlight has been shipping a native 64-bit firefox plugin for years, fyi.

Ernst Sjöstrand said...

What about totem mozilla plugin? 64 bits, pulse audio support, wide range of features and codec support with the latest version!

Dave Richards said...

@chris: :) No feminism implied by talking about grandma. Grandpa needs it simple too.

@aaron: I'm looking over the status of the open source PDF readers as part of this project. The problem is that if you are missing one little feature then people start complaining about being on Linux. We have to support forms, 3d objects and all of the other things that make reader so loved by hackers for exploits. :)

@anonymous: We haven't had a lot of moonlight/silverlight content yet in Government. For now we have had users install it on their own. If the trend changes, I'll install it globally.

@ernst: I still am testing Totem and I haven't yet gotten it to play even a basic Windows media file. I need to play Real content, Windows Media and hopefully continue to support Quicktime. All of the searching on totem seems to indicate, "stop using totem and install mplayer instead". :|

Anonymous said...

For totem, you need to install more gstreamer codecs. In particular, you want whatever your distribution calls the "gstreamer0.10-plugins-good", "gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad", and "gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly" packages, as well as "gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg". With all of those installed, totem should play almost anything you throw at it. Give that a try and see if it plays the things you need it to.

Anonymous said...

Regarding PDF readers: I throw a *lot* of PDFs at evince (also based on poppler), and I have never found anything it couldn't handle.

You might find the comparison at http://live.gnome.org/Evince/ComparingEvinceAcroread useful. Since the time of that comparison, evince has added support for bookmarks and comments, so that deficiency no longer applies. Also, performance has greatly increased; I still find it occasionally slow when viewing thousand-page complex PDFs (not kidding), but never for normal use. The rest of the comparison appears accurate to me.

Ernst Sjöstrand said...

Like Anonymous said, you need to install _all_ the gstreamer plugins and then Totem should be awesome. In Ubuntu I have:
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse
gstreamer0.10-plugins-base
gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-apps
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

Nick Mathew said...

Take a look at MediaPlayerConnectivity. It might help your plugin needs.

Nick Mathew said...

Also to embed evince in firefox, follow the steps in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=25685.