Adobe Launches Linux Flash

Adobe Systems released the Linux edition of its Flash Player 9 on Wednesday to round out the popular browser plug-in's support for the three major desktop operating systems.

The developer boasted that Player 9 processes Flash scripts 10 times faster than its predecessor, features improved memory management, and adds advanced graphics, video, and text tools.

The faster-running scripts come courtesy of the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), which made news in November when Adobe contributed AVM2 source code to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will use the code in its own Tamarin, an open source project designed to beef up the scripting engine within Firefox and Thunderbird.

Flash Player 9 debuted for Windows and Mac OS X more than six months ago.

"Now the Linux community has full access to the high volume of Flash content and applications available on the Internet today, bringing Linux developers and users to the forefront of the Web 2.0 experience," said Emmy Huang, Adobe's senior product manager, in a statement. Both Novell and Red Hat have committed to adding the new edition to their Linux distributions later this year.

The Linux player can be downloaded from Adobe's Web site free of charge.