Re: FLASH: Flash projector on UNIX

[Alias]

Robb Masters wrote:


> I realise that Flash can run in a browser on a UNIX box using the Java player, but I'd like to achieve that same effect as can be achieved with a Flash projector - i.e. user double clicks on a icon to get a full-screen, and ideally borderless, movie.

>


The Flash4 player is available for Solaris, Linux and Irix, some of the more common flavours of unix. I've been using it on linux for some time.

However, it seems that MM stopped developing the Java flash player around version 2. You must realise that there won't be simply a "unix projector" as each flavour of unix is quite different and they're generally not massively compatible with one

another.


One of the problems that you might have is that while fullscreen is easy enough to achieve on a PC running IE, IE is almost never used on Unix (although it is available for solaris) and netscape has some ethical difficulties about going fullscreen.

Netscape seem to have reasoned that if a browser could go full screen without borders it would be a bad security risk, allowing people to fake system crashes, dummy desktops, etc. I've seen a very good example of this done with IE4 where it turns your

browser into a mac desktop...


Anyway, to get around this, I believe netscape requires some kind of authentication (possibly a verisign certificate) in order to go fullscreen. This would probably be massively complex and involve fiddling about with RSA certificates & paying Verisign a

yearly fee.


>

> I've thought about the user clicking on an HTML file, but I can't find a way in JavaScript to maximise the current window or open a new maximised window.

>

> Anyone got any ideas? Any JavaScript tricks I'm missing? Is there a Java playback engine I could address directly? Or even command line switches (to turn off toolbars and go full screen) for common UNIX browsers?

>


I'd say the best bet would be netscape in Kiosk mode. If I were you I'd do some digging on Netscapes developer archives on "Kiosk Mode".

Alternatively, I'd say any half decent Linux hacker could do a version of the player that stood alone and had the swf file included, like on the PC & mac. Dunno how difficult that would be, and Linux coders often have a deeply ingrained distrust of

Flash, mainly because they tend to look on it as A)proprietary

B)a fad that won't last till the end of the year.


Although these are usually the same people who think all HTML should be written from scratch in notepad...


Hope these leads are of some use to you...


--

Alias|Rob


(prpl)x-design for the perplexed


www.prplx.com





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