The GNU Flash Player Reaches Beta

Gnash, the open-source plug-in and standalone player designed to implement Adobe Flash (SWF) that's being worked on by the Free Software Foundation, had reached a beta status last week. Gnash 0.8.2 was released and represents the first beta of this GPL Flash player. Some of the recent improvements include better keyboard handling, new classes implemented, enhancements to the Cairo and OpenGL renderers, extensions for LIRC and D-BUS, set and save preferences from the GTK GUI, and a new user manual. At this time, however, Gnash is still largely bound to SWF version 7 with ActionScript 2 partial support for v8 and v9 (currently Adobe is up to Flash 9 for Linux and ActionScript 3). Gnash will work on both x86 and x86_64 Linux and also supports the various BSD flavors with other OS support being worked on. The Gnash 0.8.2 announcement can be read on the GNU mailing list.