Macromedia, x-director & Fedora

[John Collier]

The battle to get M$ out of the house continues and I am starting to feel as if I am loosing.

I have now come up against the wall on getting the web content to come up on the sites that myself and my family like to frequent. My daughter, for example, likes to frequent http://www.cartoonnetwork.com and play some of the games that they have on their site. This doesn't seem like it should be a big problem since Mozilla on Windoze likes this site and handles it without even breaking a sweat. I have found that the site relies heavily on Macromedia software and it seems as if there is something called x-director content (is this basically the Linux equivalent to the 'direct-x' that M$ uses?).

I have been able to get some of the Macromedia stuff installed through the use of the rpm packages that I have found for flashplayer and even found an entry in a forum that stated that I should be able to use the command line 'yum install flash-plugin' to accomplish what I am looking for.

While all of these things seem to work (with the exception of using the installers directly from Macromedia, that fails miserably), I still can't seem to get all of the content on the above mentioned web site to work.

I have found several discussion threads that seem to think that getting x-director to work on Linux is a lost cause. Is this a true statement? Am I simply beating my head against the wall on this one?

If so, how am I going to be able to use Linux to replace M$ and keep the family happy? Even I like to visit some of the sites that I am sure will have some of the same types of content that my daughter's favorite site will have (truth be known, I even like to visit the same site sometimes. I guess I'm still just a big kid in some ways!).

Solutions??


Thanks,
John

[Stuart Browne]

'x-director' isn't a Linux equivalent of 'Direct X'. It's the MIME type for Macromedia Director content, and the full MIME type should be something along the lines of:

application/x-director

Now that being said, it should be fairly trivial to convince Mozilla that 'application/x-director' content should be launched with the helper application of your choice, and they should be available as plugins.

I've not tried this however, but I have heard other people having issues with this (I still use Win2K at home, and don't have plans on moving away from it for some time, even though I love my Linux boxen!).

[Martin P.J. Zinser · Accepted solution]

Hello Paul,

one way might be the crossover plugin from codeweavers. This essentially allows to run
Windows plug-ins on Linux. For more details
check

http://www.codeweavers.com/site/products/cxplugin/supported_apps/

There seems considerable support for proprietary Macromedia formats there.

Disclaimer: I do not use this and the software costs about 40 USD as far as I can tell.

Greetings, Martin

[John Collier]

Stuart,

First off, don't you EVER sleep???

Seriously, I have seen exactly what you are referring to on the pop-up that tells me that I need a plugin for my browser. It is listed as 'application/x-director' and every time that I try to find out where to get this, it points me back to the flashplayer installer.

Now, as I stated earlier, I have done many things to try to get the flashplayer installed correctly on my machine. While I was waiting on the responses to this question, I even with through the fun with the actual installer from Macromedia again and this is what I get from the command line:

rpm -ihv flash*
warning: flash-plugin-6.0.81-1.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 8df56d05
error: Failed dependencies:
libX11.so.6 is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libXext.so.6 is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libXt.so.6 is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libc.so.6 is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1.3) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.4) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libdl.so.2 is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libdl.so.2(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libdl.so.2(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libm.so.6 is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libpthread.so.0 is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1
libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by flash-plugin-6.0.81-1

A little more research shows me that this is all related to the Xfree86 package. Since I just went through this with my last little experiment with Wine, I remembered that I had just updated all of this. To prove to myself that it was all actually updated, I did the 'rpm -q Xfree86' and it tells me that I have version Xfree86-4.3.0-55 currently installed on my system. If I am following along correctly, this seems to tell me that I should have the files listed above already on my system. Is that a correct assumption or am I missing something here?


Martin,

While I appreciate the information on the Code Weavers site, I am really wanting to get this accomplished without having to go outside of the open source realm if at all possible. While I won't rule it out as a possibility, it isn't exactly what I am looking for.

Your input is appreciated though.


Regards,
John

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello John,

one word of caution, while it is nice to have the flash player installed (MLB does not work without it ;-), it only supports the futuresplash and x-shockwave-flash file types, it does >>not<< support x-director.

If you have not tackeled the problem, I can check a box a work tomorrow, where I installed this plugin recently. Since I managed it can not have been too complicated ;-)

Greetings, Martin

[Stuart Browne]

Of course I sleep! :P I just live in GMT+10, so my hours are a bit different :)

Ok, let me fire Mozilla up on my Fedora box..

..

..

damn flooded uplink at home...

this'll take a while..

Anyway, from memory there's a "MIME Types" section somewhere under edit/preferences, where you can tell Mozzie that it has a plugin for a given mime-type. You point that to the appropriate library, and it should 'just work'.

Now as for the errors you got when installing the real macromedia thingie, those libraries will be installed, just for some reason or another aren't matching up to what's listed in the RPM database. Throw a '--nodeps' at the rpm command and try forcibly installing it (rpm --nodeps -ivh flash*).

Ahh! It finally came up.. *click*click*wait*...

Edit/Preferences/Navigator/Helper Applications/, under 'File Types', find "application/x-director", edit the settings.

If it's not there, the hit 'New Type'.

In 'Mime Type', make sure it says 'application/x-director'. Fill in the appropraite extension ('.swf' isn't it? or something like that), then select 'Open it with', and choose the appropriate helper application.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello John,

just checked on my box here. I do have the RPM installed you quoted. I agree with Stuart that your RPM database seems to be confused (assuming you do have X up and running ;-)

Try to throw in in --force on the install and see how it develops from there. To check if the plugin is recognized use Help->About plugins in Mozilla.

To Stuart, while your general description of adding a helper application is certainly usefull, do you have one that actually handles x-director?

Greetings, Martin

[Stuart Browne]

Martin, No. Unfortunately not. Just hypothetical at this point on my end.

[John Collier]

OK,

Maybe I have confused this a little. It's always possible that in my search+trial & error while simultaneously posting things here I might be either leaving out information or perhaps I have just tried something different since my last post.

I was able to get the flashplayer stuff to work on the site shortly after using the 'yum install flash-plugin' command line. For some reason it worked without any errors and the flash content on the site mentioned above seemed to work. I thought that there was some correlation between the flashplayer and the x-director application simply because each time I would click on a link to get more on the application it would take me back to the flash site. The only reason for going back to it so many times was that I still didn't see it listed in my browser's list of plugins for the longest time and I was having the issues with the x-director stuff.

Now I see the errors of that line of thinking, but I am still without a solution on how to get this application to work. The browser now has two plugins listed (Shockwave Flash and FutureSplash Player) but still the x-director stuff is a no show.

The thread on this site helped on my efforts (
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/148821 ) but I have been unable to locate anything like it in my search to 'fix' the x-director stuff.



Martin,

I do have X up and running. I still don't have enough confidence in my limited Linux abilities to attempt to do any different. Besides, I can't actually get it all configured out right for my girls to use as a desktop if I don't actually try it as I go :-P~~



Stuart,

While your explanation is worthy of note, if we don't know what application handles the x-director stuff, then how would I know what to have it point to?


Any more thoughts, anyone?


Regards,
John

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello John,

I did some further research and all I found is the crossover plugin I mentioned earliert. As it seems currently there is no support for x-director on Linux. And since Macromedia "owns" the format somebody would most probably first have to reverse engeneer it to write one.

Sorry for the bad news.

Martin

[Stuart Browne]

Good point ;)

My apologies, I mis-understood some of the thread.

after reading through a few posts here and there, it appears as if Macromedia are not playing nice! There doesn't appear to be any Shockwave plugin for Linux.

Sorry. Wine+IE6?

NOTE: Shockwave's are created using Macromedia Director, i.e. x-director, as against Macromedia Flash's, i.e. x-shockwave-flash.

NOTE2: http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-5170061.html?tag=st_lh : Whether that means good stuff or not is a different question..

[John Collier]

So basically what I am beginning to see is that Linux isn't really quite there as a general home replacement for M$ at this time since there isn't really support for all of the web content that the general home user would be likely to come across on their journeys down the information super-highway.

I was going to play with the Wine idea only to get some of the learning software that my daughter currently owns and uses to work, not to plague myself with M$ Internet Exploder all over again.

Perhaps I will just have to wait a bit longer for all of the potholes to be filled before I can kick M$ out of the house...

How disappointing :-(


Thanks for the input from those brave souls that have attacked this for me. Fear not. I will assign points to this thread, but I will have to do some soul searching to figure out exactly how to award them since the basic issue can't be resolved at this time.


Warm Regards,
John


PS I am still open to suggestions from anybody who may have a brainstorm on this.

[broadway]

John,

Can you provide a link of the page(s) you are trying to view? I'd like to test it on my Fedora box.

Thanks,
-joe

[John Collier]

Joe,

The links are above. There are several of them in this thread, but the ones that I am having the most problems with are the ones on the Cartoon Network site. If you can provide a solution, I am all ears...