Ask Klaus!

Flash Alternatives

Klaus: Flash doesn't work well, so what is a person to do? Could you use the Wine program and download a Windows browser version; install SeaMonkey, Chrome, or something else? What about Lightspark? Does it work?

Thanks, Joe

Answer

It seems that, probably, because of its proprietary nature and frequent security problems, many vendors are abandoning Flash as a browser plugin or video player for their browsers lately. But, there are still fields of application for Flash:

1. videos, especially the Flash player-optimized .flv video format,
2. interactive games or programs written in Adobe's Flash programming language ActionScript, and
3. interactive and multimedia elements in some websites.

The original Flash Player is not really needed anymore for just playing videos because MPlayer or VLC can play .flv files with much better performance. Also, YouTube offers an alternative HTML5-based view for many videos, especially the newer videos. So, if you go to the so-called "experimental" HTML5 version of YouTube [1], you might be able to say goodbye to the Flash plugin and use the browser's internal video player support.

About Wine: Most Flash problems are not related to Windows or Linux, so running Windows programs in the Wine emulator and installing the Windows version of Flash Player there will most likely not give you a more stable or faster Flash experience than running Flash natively on Linux.

Lightspark [2] is a quite new and interesting replacement project for the Flash-based video player. It aims to be faster and more stable than the original player, yet it is open source and does not contain proprietary modules. The project is located on GitHub, and an official Debian package is available: browser-plugin-lightspark [3].

If you still need proprietary Flash support in Debian, you can download and upgrade the Flash plugin by installing the newest flashplugin-nonfree package. Then, run

sudo update-flashplugin-nonfree

to check for and install the newest versions of the Flash plugin for Firefox/Iceweasel.

A TrueType Font How-To

Is there an easy way to install a TrueType font in Linux?

Answer

Quite a few Xorg versions ago, you had to regenerate directory caches and let the X server rescan the entire font list.

For scalable TrueType fonts, the installation has become a lot less complex since client programs handling TrueType fonts do most of the work themselves through dynamically linked font-rendering libraries.

Although this means less installation work for you, it also means a slightly slower startup time for programs handling fonts, like GIMP or LibreOffice (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Sample font.

To install custom TrueType fonts, it's practical to create a new per-fontset directory – or at least add one extra directory to hold your fonts.

sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/extra

Now, to make a new font available system-wide, you can just copy the .ttf file there:

sudo cp fontfile.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/extra/

Make sure it's readable for everyone,

sudo chmod 755 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/extra
sudo chmod 644 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/extra/fontfile.ttf

and then you're done. :-)

Alternatively, you can check your distribution's package manager for font packages containing free and contributed fonts available for installation.

To check to see whether a program is capable of using TrueType fonts, list its dynamic libraries and look for "freetype" and "font" (Listing 1).

$ ldd /usr/bin/gimp | grep -E 'font|freetype'
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 (0xf6e28000)
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libfontconfig.so.1 (0xf6de8000)

Libfreetype is a TrueType-compatible open source library for rendering TrueType fonts in an application, and libfontconfig lets the program know how to identify a font by name and find a requested font in the filesystem.

Browser Settings in Knoppix 7.2.0 Paranoid?

Hello, I noticed you are again using the advertisement blocker AdBlockPlus, and also NoScript in a setting that blocks all active contents like JavaScript by default in Firefox on Knoppix 7.2.0.

Isn't that somewhat paranoid? Being a Linux user, there are not so many viruses around that could infect my computer over a website. And, many websites don't work right – shopping and travelling sites especially don't display real-time search results. The first thing I do is select "allow scripts globally (not recommended)." Why do you make things so complicated in Knoppix? Other distros just deliver Firefox with no security plugins installed or enabled, and leave it to the user to add more security stuff.

Answer

You are right, the security policy of Knoppix is somewhat more restrictive than other Live systems. In general, the Knoppix philosophy is:

1. Don't run any servers and services that are accessible from the Internet, unless the user explicitly requests so.
2. Don't use any Internet services and don't transmit any personal data to websites unless the user requests so.

These privacy-related rules could explain why many settings are, at the beginning, somewhat restrictive. I actually do use these settings on my working computers myself as well. And, I only enable JavaScript on websites that I know are safe when I need a feature like the practical live search results you mentioned (Figure  2).

Figure 2: Allowing content on a specific page.

The reason for blocking active content by default is, of course, that an unknown website might contain malicious content that could exploit weaknesses of your browser or trick you into being on a different website, reading your keyboard to obtain passwords or taking screenshots to spy out your desktop.

Even though just a few websites might successfully steal passwords from your computer without your noticing, is it worthwhile to take the chance, rather than investing just a single click on each of your favorite websites to allow active content?

Linux might not be affected by the majority of malware around, but it's still possible to compromise your browser via "cross-site scripting" attacks. And, if you do important stuff with your browser like money transactions or accessing protected websites with your personal data, you don't want others stealing your identity. Therefore, I recommend leaving the default enabled for NoScript and just adding your favorite websites, one by one, to the exception list, to always stay on the safe side. I don't think this is paranoid; I'd call it just being careful. :-) With the NoScript settings for Firefox restricted by default, I can recommend Knoppix with good confidence for online banking and secure access to many websites.

Blocking advertisements with AdBlockPlus is a somewhat "political" issue. On one hand, I perfectly understand that advertisers want to make money by counting clicks or boost the popularity of products. On the other hand, some websites are overloaded with advertisements, and some ads actually consume more bandwidth than the informational part of the page, or cause bad rendering of the page.

When using the web, I want to read information and identify links and locations accurately. But, on some sites, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the real content and advertisements on a page. If you've ever tried to find the correct download button on a website that offers a product, yet also advertises 10 other products for download, you know what I'm talking about. For shopping on the web, however, the attitude may be different; you might want to switch off AdBlockPlus then.