On Fedora x86_64, running Firefox and Gnash (Free Flash alternative) passes webpage test but does not display tutorial properly (blank screen)
Thom: We looked into this issue. However unfortunately, none of the developer have experience with gnash. Do you know if there’s any way that we could detect gnash in order to display a message to users that it is not supported? Thank you for your help!
Thom: As a followup on a different topic: you brought up the issue that EteRNA should test whether the browser has Javascript enabled (which is required to play EteRNA).
We have implemented this feature. Thank you for the feedback!
I would prefer an attempt at making this work rather than a blanket “we don’t support gnash”
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedi… states “Flash’s security record[…] has caused several security experts to recommend to not install Flash or to block it.[…] The US-CERT recommends to block Flash using NoScript.”
I downloaded one of EteRNA’s .swf files. It has a reported Root SWF version of 10. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ and http://www.gnashdev.org/ indicates they only support v 7 with some 8/9/10 support.
lightspark is at http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ligh…
Swfdec is at http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/
Others are at http://osflash.org/open_source_flash_…
Running gnash in debug on the swf file reports…
ERROR: This SWF file requires AVM2, which was not enabled at compile time.
ERROR: *** no tag loader for type 86 (movie)
ERROR: *** no tag loader for type 82 (movie)
ERROR: *** no tag loader for type 76 (movie)ERROR: SWFStream::consumeInput: underlying stream couldn’t go_to_end: Error while seeking to end
AVM2 pledge is at http://www.pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2
Is there a compelling development reason to use SWF 10?
Thom
The link to AVM2 pledge discussion is broken.
thanks. Fixed to point to pledge site directly
Thom. Unfortunately, EteRNA uses Alchemy to compile the underlying molecular dynamics package, which requires AVM2. I don’t see a way around this until Gnash supports AVM2 as well.
For the time being, if there were some marker indicating the use of gnash, we could at least indicate that it’s not supported, and we can look into backporting EteRNA at some future point.
thanks for the information.
AVM2 seems to be a Virtual Machine. https://code.google.com/p/as3c/ is a bytecode compiler for AVM2. It is no longer maintained but they recommend https://code.google.com/p/apparat/. These projects can be used to output code that can run on Mac and Linux.
I found https://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin but I believe it is the JavaScript portion. Isn’t there an underlying C/C++ library that can be made into a standalong app?
http://haxe.org/ was also mentioned but probably doesn’t fit in with your development model
Thom: Thank you for looking into this for us. I’ve looked at Tamarin, but it doesn’t seem to allow us to get around using the AVM2 to compile C code. To be realistic, the EteRNA developer team is completely swamped right now, and my feeling is that we’re not going to be able to support Gnash in the near term, unless Gnash itself starts to support the AVM2.
In the medium term, this might be something that a motivated dev-team member might be able to look into during summer break.
Also, if someone in the community wanted to look into this, we would be willing to work with them.