[Flash 10 on Browse] Flash 10 does not work with the webcam on the XO.

[overbyte]

Flash 10 (version 10,0,15,3) still does not work with the XO's webcam. I have Sugar build 767 installed. When I visit a website that uses Flash in a video chat application (www.vyew.com), and I click to activate the webcam video, Flash pops up a security setting dialog asking for permission to let the website connect with my camera, but that Flash dialog window is frozen. It won't respond to clicking, not even to clicking on the Close button. The only way to close the dialog is to reload the page or navigate away. I also get the same behavior when I right-click inside the Flash movie at the Adobe Flash Player "about" page on Adobe's web site and click on the Settings menu item there -- the popup settings dialog freezes on top of the movie.

To rule out that this is a problem with Browse rather than Flash Player plugin itself, I launched Opera which I had previously installed on my XO. Opera is worse. It won't even play the Flash movie at Adobe's "about" page and doesn't display the "Click to Play" message. When I visit the page using Flash, I see error messages at Terminal from Opera, which I launched with the command "Opera &" to let it run as a separate process, saying that a module failed and is being ignored, so I suspect Opera is having trouble loading or initializing Flash Player 10 plugin.

Looking at the output of the "top" command in Terminal, I see that there is very little memory available after Opera has loaded, so perhaps the little XO just doesn't have enough RAM to load Flash Player 10 when Opera is also running. I don't know why "top" also reports that swap memory is not available. Perhaps using swap would let Opera at least load FlashPlayer in virtual memory and run, although at poor speed. Does the XO come configured to use the solid-state hard disk drive for a swap partition? Must all running processes fit within the physical RAM space only?

Even if Opera is too large to run with Flash Player 10, at least the smaller Browse browser can run Flash Player 10, so I would hope that someone at OLPC keeps some pressure on Adobe's Flash Player team to get Flash Player 10 working on the XO. Or, if the problem lies in the Browse activity, then Sugar team should try to get Browse working with Flash Player 10's use of the webcam.

[erikos]

I am not a gnash expert - so someone else might want to comment what the current status is.

[erikos]

I don't think this is a handlebar bug. What we offer is gnash, and I can not/won't make pressure on Adobe.

[overbyte]

I installed the (X)Ubuntu version adapted for the XO by user "Teapot" as described on the forum at OlpcNews. It installs on a 2GB SD card and with developer's key installed, the XO boots and runs it well. With Firefox and Adobe FlashPlayer 10 installed on it, I can run Flash application sites such as www.vyew.com perfectly. The XO's web cam works, settings dialog popup behaves properly, the Adobe "about" page plays, etc. So, the problem I described above is not located in the Adobe FlashPlayer. FlashPlayer 10 plays on Linux, just not the configuration in the XO and not with Browse. Gnash does not run the www.vyew.com site's Flash (Flex) application. Vyew requires FlashPlayer 9 (or generic equivalent) or newer. Gnash is not yet a complete implementation of the Flash virtual machine. With Vyew, I have 2-way video, 2-way audio, from multiple simultaneous users as in a conference call, plus whiteboard shared by the connected users, between my XO and remote users with PCs, over the Internet. You can see more about this setup at www.internetmathtutoring.com/olpc which describes the software and the demonstration project developing tutoring between USA, Ghana, and Kenya. I had to go to Ubuntu because Sugar on the XO didn't have the functionality to support these ingredients for online tutoring.

Rather than putting pressure on Adobe, the solution is to look at Browse and Gnash to see why they don't work with Flex applications and make the appropriate bug reports upstream.

[tomeu]

Replying to overbyte:

Rather than putting pressure on Adobe, the solution is to look at Browse and Gnash to see why they don't work with Flex applications and make the appropriate bug reports upstream.

I'm still not sure what could be done in Sugar to fix this. Could you try running plain fedora 9 with gnome on the XO and see if the camera works on either Gnash or Adobe's Flash?

If it works, then it's a Sugar bug (quite improbable), if it doesn't you can file bugs at Fedora, Gnash and/or Adobe. Though note that the version you mentioned is quite old and those projects might not care any more.

[overbyte]

I don't have the time nor the need any longer (since Ubuntu on the XO meets our project's needs) to install plain Fedora 9 on an SD card for the XO, but maybe developers working on XO-1.5 could test Fedora/Firefox/Gnash on it. The Ubuntu version I've installed has the same kernel as the Fedora factory-installed on the XO-1, so it knows about the special keys, has drivers for the XO's camera, mic, NIC, etc. I would not expect plain Fedora to work properly without a lot of effort to get the right drivers into the kernel modules.

The point is, if the XO has a future, it should include the ability to interact with Flex applications. Otherwise, it's going to remain a useful device for age 6-12, but not beyond the special world of Sugar. Its browsing capabilities are crippled without support for Adobe Flex/FlashPlayer web applications.

[dnarvaez]

Milestone 0.86 deleted