A new, Mandriva Linux 2008-based version of the Mandriva Flash bootable USB key was released. Flash boots a complete Mandriva desktop on almost any PC, letting you take your desktop with your own data anywhere. The new version can also run Windows versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, with your bookmarks and email, when plugged into a Windows PC.

"...Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools..."

On the plus side, Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, version identifier 9.0.115.0 was made available for Linux at the same time as Mac and Windows versions. It's nice to see Linux not being treated as the little brother who only gets the older, hand-me down programs by a major software vendor. An even bigger win for Flash Player users, regardless of their operating system, is that its supports H.264.[Note: the flash player is not free software]

A bootable 4 GB Flash Drive containing a portable version of Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available from Mandriva for 79 EUR ($89) and from Amazon for $94. The general idea is that you can take this little memory stick with you and be able to run Linux from it, do Internet and Office tasks with Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, and save your files to the free space on the drive. The Mandriva system can access Windows volumes, and the free space on the flash drive can be read from Windows.

Adobe has released the final version of its Flash Player Update 3, an important update that brings several new features. To get the update, available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris, visit Adobe Flash Player Download Center.

A Skype user received a message about security problem with his Windows machine. The funny part, is he was running Linux!

Around the time of the release of Ubuntu 7.10, I tried out the Gnash Flash player included in that release. Because Adobe’s Flash player can not be redistributed in the default Ubuntu installation, a choice of players are offered when you visit a page in Firefox with Flash content. There are three options in Ubuntu 8.04: Adobe Flash, Swfdec (new to this version), and Gnash.

There exists no official flash package available for the 64bit architecture with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. If you click the add plugin button when visiting a page with flash, you are taken to the official Flash site and will soon notice that there are no available 64bit downloads here either. There are some workarounds on ubuntu forums, however, they don't always seem to work and get complicated if you have compiled your own 32bit Firefox. We have been using both the official 64bit Firefox package from the Kubuntu repositories as well as a modified 32bit version I built quite a while ago to get around some stability issues with the 64bit version. So after about a year without flash support, we finally took the plunge and have built a quick and easy solution.

Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement -- any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so -- but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).