TR Forums

Well maybe not entirely.

I have cannibalized a few old P3 era PC into 1 'gaming' machine for my son(6). The intent was to let him have his own machine to watch a few videos and to play online games.
The standard fare offered by the likes of miniclip, BBC kids, Kids CBC, BBC - Children, etc...

I have Hardy Heron set up, running well, no issues with hardware, it truly worked straight out of the box (well .iso).
Now, I find that Adobe does not provide Shockwave for Linux. Nor does it appear that they are in the process of creating one. Oddly enough, there is Shockwave for Mac OSX, a variant of BSD, a cousin of linux, so how hard would it be to port it over? Maybe its a conspiracy (where is my tinfoil hat)?

My last hope is this help page. But this seems like smashing a square peg in a round hole. And I wonder about updates...

I do not have an extra license for Windows, nor do I want to buy one, this is a zero budget build.

Well, the Wine + Firefox + Windows Shockwave plugin approach is certainly at least worth a try.

I haven't messed around with Wine much, but the (few) times I did it seemed to work OK.

Edit: Do you really need the Shockwave plugin, or just Flash? A Flash plugin is in fact available for Linux.

Edit 2: It would likely be simpler (and less trouble-prone) to just use the Firefox-on-Wine browser when going to Shockwave sites, instead of trying to "embed" the Windows Firefox into the Ubuntu one like that page you linked tries to do. You could probably create desktop shortcuts for the various sites which will launch the Firefox/Wine combo with the appropriate URL.

"sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree" will get you Flash support and that's usually enough for the type of sites that you listed. I've not come across much that is shockwave only.

I'd just like to add that the shockwave/flash problem (along with Adobe in general) is one of my biggest annoyances when dealing with Linux. I really really wish the web would move to something more open for it's multimedia content, but I guess that's not gonna happen anytime soon.

notfred wrote:

"sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree" will get you Flash support and that's usually enough for the type of sites that you listed. I've not come across much that is shockwave only.

I spent a bunch of time screwing around with that on debian and I could never get it to work properly for sites like msn (big shock there) and youtube.

Yes i realize that Flash != Shockwave. I have Flash installed and running without issue.
I need Shockwave, as it appears that most of the kiddie games out there are written for Shockwave.

I will try the Wine + Win 32 FF + Shockwave to see how it goes.
I would like to use the embedded method as it should provide better usability, otherwise your suggestion for multiple shortcuts makes sense.

Thanks