Over on the Adobe Flash/Linux blog it looks like more definitive times have been given for the final stable release: Early 2007.
The team mentioned they are planning a Beta before that for later 2006 I assume which will be welcome after they are done fixing all the known issues with the plugin (which was the reason for skipping an Alpha or Preview release right now).
For those of you that have been following the blog you know the team has been making a lot of progress recently, being able to view almost all of the major flash sites out there (YouTube, Google Video, etc.) without incident. In one of the more recent entries they did mention now they are starting work on the Flex2 support which I expect will take a majority of the time and testing since it introduces complexities that simply watching Flash movies doesn’t.
They have also finalized their decision on the GUI toolkit they will be using and it’s GTK:
The reason was that a lot of the code in the Flash 7 plugin was already linked to GTK so they were able to reuse a large portion of it. I think that was a good decision to use GTK given the steam behind it, but I could imagine KDE folks being upset.
Workaround
For those of you that need Flash 9 on Linux right away, there are ways, using Wine and Firefox, to get around this limitation but it’s not the greatest. Following this guide, you can download Firefox and Flash for Windows then install them both using Wine. Then you can use that particular install of Firefox to do any necessary testing and most folks report that it works quite well, although a little slow.
I’ll personally hold out for the plugin, there have only been a few things I couldn’t view because of Linux being up to Flash 7 only at this time, I hope the Beta release of the Flash 9 player will be ready by the holidays and with all the feedback from the community the Adobe-Linux team can come back from vacation refreshed, ready to create the 1.0 release, or kill themselves if there is too much feedback. I hope it’s the first option.
