Adobe Flash 'Square' for Linux 64bit

After putting 64bit native Linux Flash player on hold indefinitely, Adobe have done an about turn and released a version of Flash Player 10.2 'Square' preview for 64 bit Linux as well. Good things about this release are that:

• After some serious security flaws were discovered, Adobe advised on an upgrade. But for us poor 64bit Linux users, there was no 64 bit version to upgrade to until now.
• It's a native Linux 64bit binary which should integrate well with Pulseaudio etc and use less reources. This funny comment on Slashdot illustrates the previous state of things really well.
• I suddenly seem to be able to watch 1080p HD videos on Youtube. Can't recall ever seeing that option while I was using the old player.

So go ahead and grab the new version from here. To install the plugin in Fedora, just untar and copy libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

Ugly font rendering in Chrome Linux Beta and Unstable

Just upgraded to Google Chrome Beta (6.xx) and then to Unstable (7.xx) in my Fedora box and noticed the  butt-ugly font rendering in both versions. Apparently it's a known issue with gtk-webkit, but I would have expected Google to fix something as elementary and important as font rendering before concentrating on anything else.

A bit of Googling (ofcourse!) dug up this excellent post that fixed the font rendering issue in seconds!

Compare the before and after shots to see how severe the issue is:

Before

After

Firefox 4 Beta On Fedora

Just stumbled on this blog post while skimming through Google Reader and thought I should share it.

To get the latest Beta installed, follow these steps:


sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-firefox4.repo http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/firefox4/fedora-firefox4.repo

sudo yum install firefox4