Flash Player 9 And World of Warcraft in Ubuntu

I actually wrote this entry a couple of days ago but at the time when I wrote it I couldn’t get to my server to post it and am just getting around to posting it now. I think I’m pretty much convinced it’s time to stop being cheap and get a VPS account running Ubuntu or FreeBSD to host my stuff on rather than hosting from home.

Adobe released Flash Player 9 Beta for Linux earlier this week which I installed and it seems to work perfectly. I’ve only done a “sniff test” so far as watching some streaming video online, but the video worked and the sound was synced-up correctly. It’s also very easy to install– you basically just create a plugins directory in your home/.mozilla directory, copy the .so file there, and you’re done. I was really impressed with how easy it was as well as that it worked the first time, etc. Thanks Adobe! While admittedly I can be an OSS zealot at times, I certainly don’t have any problem most of the time with closed commercial software in Linux as long as it does what it’s supposed to, and from what I can tell, the new Flash Player 9 beta is a shining example of that.

Also last night I decided to try and get World of Warcraft running on my workstation using Cedega. It was quite easy– I signed-up for a Cedega account, downloaded the Debian package and installed it. Once I ran Cedega it picked-up all of my hardware automagically. I then copied over my World Of Warcraft install from my Windows partition to my home directory, configured Cedga to use ALSA sound, and it worked pretty well. Unfortunately the machine I’m using is close to 3 years old, and it was pretty obvious at times, so I’ll probably continue to have to boot to Windows to play WoW until I get a new workstation (probably sometime next year after the quad-core CPU’s are fairly ubiquitous). I haven’t really messed with the config that much so after some more research I might be able to get it running pretty well, so I’m not quite ready to give-up on it yet.

Anyhow, it’s good to see that I’m able to do about ~98% of the things I would normally do in Windows in Linux. I’m essentially preparing myself for a fully Windows-less world at home because I simply will not be a Windows Vista customer given it’s very draconian licensing terms, built-in DRM, etc. I’m not someone who tends to lie down and take it when something violates my personal ethics, and as such, I think Windows XP is the last stop on the Microsoft train for me (I also switched to Open Office some time ago).