Re: [Gnash] gnash FreeBSD ports, problems with firefox plugin

[Rob Savoye]

Dmitry Marakasov wrote:

> I've just made a port of gansh to FreeBSD. Standalone player seem
> to work, but I've encountered some problems with firefox plugin,
> and I hope you could help me. The problem is that firefox doesn't
> see the plugin, althrough I've tried to place it (libgnash.so) into
> firefox' plugin directory. I've tried restarting FF, but the plugin
> just won't become listed under about:plugins. ATM I have no idea
> on how it can be fixed, as I don't personally use FF and have no
> experience on how it's plugins work or are to be installed.

  If there are problems with library dependencies, the plugin won't 
load. Unless you run a development build of Firefox, it just doesn't say 
anything about their being a problem. To resolve this, I'd look into 
which libraries aren't present. You may also need to add /usr/local/lib 
to /etc/ld.so.con and run ldconfig. At least on GNU/Linux that lets 
Firefox find the libraries. Setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH may also work.

> There's another strange fact I've noticed: ldd shows that libgnash.so
> depends on libmozsdk.so.0, which is not installed anywhere, (so it
> will be deleted after gnash port is build an installed). I also
> didn't find this library with mozilla/firefox distribution. Default
> FF plugins are linked against libnspr instead.

  This is in the gnash/plugin/mozilla-sdk directory, and should be 
installed with "make install". It's the files one needs to build a 
plugin without having the FireFox/Mozilla sources around in a fresh build.

> By the way, opera does see the plugin (showing it as unnamed though,
> but successfully associating it with application/x-shockwave-flash
> MIME type). Unfortunately I could not test it under opera, because
> there's some problems with opera's motifwrapper which doesn't work
> under FreeBSD (someone on my work told me that it can be fixed, so
> I may test it after all, on the next week).

  Very interesting it works with Opera. That would lead me to think you 
have the dynamic linker path setup correctly. Is your build of Firefox a 
GTK2+ one ?

> If you are interested, here's list of changes I had to make in gnash
> files to make it compile under FreeBSD (some of these may be gnash
> bugs as well):

  Thanks for the patch, I'll look through these. I'll check them in as 
long as they don't break anything, which it looks like so far these 
shouldn't.

> * My port installs all docs by itself, because there's an error when
> gnome scrollkeeper is not installed. I don't want to add scrollkeeper to
> dependencies, and also FreeBSD ports collection has it's own way to
> handle .omf files (done so that when building binary package from port
> .omf files are still handled in a right way).

  I can make the scrollkeeper support optional too. It's used only for 
GNOME help support, which not everyone runs.

> * Finally, I've added a knob whether a user wants firefox plugin to be
> installed. As I didn't find a way to tell configure not to build a
> plugin while firefox is still installed, I just replace firefox-config
> string by firefox-config1 in ./configure. I know that that's an ugly
> hack :)

  You should be able to pass --disable-plugin to configure to have it 
not build the plugin.

> Though the player is not yet very usable (it had successfully played
> none of .swf files I've tried it on), I lay a big hope on this project,
> so thank you very much for your work. It would be very cool to finally
> have working opensource flash player :)

  That's the idea! :-) As more and more web sites move towards the use 
of Flash content, the free software world needs a player that can work 
on all platforms.

        - rob -