Gnasher

As I've got a little time on my hands whilst the youngest nobody is playing on his PlayPal (a great little hand-held game system) I'm going to see if I can install Gnash, which is an open source Flash movie player / plugin.
As is sometimes the case, although Gnash isn't too big a program to compile from scratch, the dependencies take a bit longer. In this case Boost is our missing dependency. One nice touch is the makefile actually gives you the link to where you can download it.

Now, although I already have Adobe's Flash plugin installed, I'm curious to see how the free alternative measures up - especially if it performs better. For people using 64 bit versions of Linux Gnash is the only way to get a 64 bit native Flash player. This isn't a problem for me as I'm still using my trusty old Athlon XP 2200 but hey, who knows what the future may bring eh?

* ring ring *

Oh, excuse me a moment, I'll just get that.

. . . .

Sorry about that - that was the plumbers just confirming that they were coming out today.

While I wait for Boost to finish compiling I'd better get some housework done.

. . . .

Right. Boost has finished compiling and is installing as I type this, and the plumber is upstairs taking the cistern to pieces. So to keep myself from annoying him whilst he's trying to do a job, let's see if I can get Gnash installed.

(My God! There was one hell of a lot of watery sounds from upstairs! MUSTN'T PANIC!)

Now, let's have another go at the Gnash compile. I'm using OpenGL as the rendering engine (using the --enable-renderer=opengl parameter) .

And even though I've compiled and installed Boost - it says it needs Boost threads. Which are there. OK, so let's run ldconfig to make sure everything is up to date and try again.

Nope, still didn't work. I'll have to have a think about this one ;)

On a more positive note - we're flushing again! Yay!