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Regarding my prior message, I just found this bug report at Adobe
regarding camera not working with FlashPlayer on Linux, but it says
that FlashPlayer 10 should resolve the problem. Apparently it didn't
on the XO. <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-137">https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-137</a><br>
<br>
Stan<br>
<br>
-------- Original Message --------
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<th align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="baseline">Subject: </th>
<td>Problems with Adobe Flash player on the XO.</td>
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<th align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="baseline">Date: </th>
<td>Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:20:38 -0800</td>
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<th align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="baseline">From: </th>
<td>Stanley Sokolow <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:overbyte@earthlink.net"><overbyte@earthlink.net></a></td>
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<th align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="baseline">To: </th>
<td>Nirbheek Chauhan <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:nirbheek.chauhan@gmail.com"><nirbheek.chauhan@gmail.com></a></td>
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<th align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="baseline">CC: </th>
<td><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:devel@lists.laptop.org">devel@lists.laptop.org</a></td>
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<th align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="baseline">References: </th>
<td><a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:8b4c83ad0901010046rc055feaw7b82db5c1de2e2fe@mail.gmail.com"><8b4c83ad0901010046rc055feaw7b82db5c1de2e2fe@mail.gmail.com></a></td>
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<pre>Hi,
I'm having problems: Adobe FlashPlayer doesn't detect the XO's built-in
webcam so it can't transmit video out to the Internet on Flash-enabled
web sites, and the Adobe Flash player on the XO freezes the popup
right-click control panel. Gnash didn't work at all with a Flash-based
web site we're interested in, so I went to the real FlashPlayer, latest
version.
I've been lurking here watching the comments on Gnash versus Flash while
I tried to get my wife's XO playing nicely with a Flash-based RIA (rich
internet application) site called <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.vyew.com">www.vyew.com</a> . (That's pronounced
like "view".) Vyew is a collaborative whiteboard application with
video, voice, and text chatting features in addition to the
whiteboard. By whiteboard, I mean that several users can connect to
the same page and collaborate on drawing sketches and typing text on the
same screen, which is visible to all of the connected people. They
can also activate their camera and microphone (if they exist) to carry
on two-way conversations like Skype. She wants to use this for a
remote tutoring activity where she interacts with students about math
problems. We tried to get Paint and Colors activities to play nicely
with various Sugar emulators (LiveCD, Sugar on Ubuntu, Sugar on Windows
Vista) but they all had various problems seeing (presence detection) or
collaborating. So we found this web site, Vyew. The Vyew site didn't
load the Flash content on the web page with Browse and Gnash, so I
installed the real Adobe Flash player on the XO. We have been largely
successful with Vyew and Adobe FlashPlayer on the XO. Both computers
can see each other's drawings collaboratively on the same page, but we
ran into one problem that relates to Flash on the XO.
The XO browser can see the webcam video stream from our Dell laptop
running Vyew on the Dell's Vista browsers (MS IE & Firefox) and can hear
the audio stream from the Dell, but I can't get Flash to activate the
XO's camera. When I right-click on the Flash box in the web page, the
Flash popup menu appears. I click the "settings" item. Adobe Flash
Player control panel pops up as it should, but it is just frozen. I
can't get it to flip to the other tabs to set the camera & microphone
permissions. In fact, the panel won't even quit when I click the Close
button. Nothing gets rid of it except reloading or leaving the web
page. This was while running on the XO's Browse activity. I thought
that maybe Opera for the XO would do better. No luck. Opera as
installed from the wiki.laptop.org/opera instructions does not even play
the Flash on the Adobe web site: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/about">www.adobe.com/products/flash/about</a> ,
nor any other Flash embedded in a web page. All that Opera shows is a
gray rectangle where the Flash should be, no text saying to click to
play the Flash. This is apparently a problem of Opera not interacting
well with FlashPlayer, because the Opera plugin directories point to the
very same plugin program file by symbolic linkage, so it's not a bad
plugin file -- the Adobe plugin plays the Flash .swf embedded element
with Browse, just not perfectly, but Opera doesn't play it at all.
I submitted a comment to the Opera programmer who maintains the Opera
blog about the OLPC version, but that blog has had very little activity
in the past year so I'm not hopeful of any results from the Opera
people. Has anyone here tried to run a recent release of Opera on the
XO, not the very old version that was customized for the XO according to
our wiki?
For the record, here are the various versions I'm running: XO has build
767 of Sugar, the XO is one recently received from the G1G1 program
through Amazon, the FlashPlayer is the one recommended on the
wiki.laptop.org page:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/flash-plugin-10.0.15.3-release.i386.rpm">http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/flash-plugin-10.0.15.3-release.i386.rpm</a>
, the "about" Flash page reports the correct release 10,0,15,3 and so
does the README in the flash-plugin folder on the XO, and uname reports
that my XO's Linux version is 2.6.25-20080925.1.olpc.f10b654367d7065.
Even without the 2-way video streaming, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.vyew.com">www.vyew.com</a> is a nice
application for collaboration over the Internet. Try it.
Stan Sokolow
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