There is a very popular multimedia format called Shockwave (with swf file format). This is an awesome format that we could use it to make a lightweight video tutorial or, commonly used to build a lightweight but rich and interactive game called flashgame.
To play swf, we need an software called flashplayer. And there are two version of flashplayer : (1) Flashplayer browser plugin that works with Internet Browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome and IE; (2) Flashplayer Standalone. This is a standalone software (with window and menus) to open swf files. The easier way to play swf is by Internet Browser with flashplayer plugin, but that is little less elegant and little more heavy than using Standalone Player.
In Linux, there are some Flashplayer Standalone project, includes open source and proprietary project :
libflash-swfplayer. This is an obsolete project and its package doesn't exist anymore in Ubuntu repository above Hardy Heron.
Gnash. This is popular open source flashplayer standalone in Linux and this is still active until now. We could install it from Ubuntu repos.
Adobe / Macromedia Flashplayer Standalone. This is an official project from the swf format developer : Adobe / Macromedia. And happily, there is a Linux version for this software so we could install it to play any swf in Linux with elegance :
The (probably) last version of this software is version 10 and could be downloaded easily using wget at this link (this is can't be downloaded by firefox or any other browser, only wget) :
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/10/flashplayer_10_sa.tar.gz
And just like usual, I like to pack any good stuff into a Debian DEB installer package so I could install it easily in the future with elegance, and I've packed this software so you could install it in your Ubuntu/Debian system and you could use it as the default player for any swf file. This is the Debian package and I've stored it in Dropbox :
adobe-flashplayer-standalone-linux_10_i386_debian.deb
I hope you enjoy this app and happy Linuxing ! :)
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