Pipelight 0.2.3 released and ubuntu installation instructions included

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Pipelight, which allows to run your favorite Silverlight application directly inside your Linux browser. The project combines the effort by Erich E. Hoover with a new browser plugin that embeds Silverlight directly in any Linux browser supporting the Netscape Plugin API. He worked on a set of Wine patches to get Playready DRM protected content working inside Wine and afterwards created an Ubuntu package called Netflix Desktop. This package allows one to use Silverlight inside a Windows version of Firefox, which works as a temporary solution but is not really user-friendly and moreover requires Wine to translate all API calls of the browser. To solve this problem we created Pipelight.

Pipelight consists out of two parts: A Linux library which is loaded into the browser and a Windows program started in Wine. The Windows program, called pluginloader.exe, simply simulates a browser and loads the Silverlight DLLs. When you open a page with a Silverlight application the library will send all commands from the browser through a pipe to the Windows process and act like a bridge between your browser and Silverlight.

The Pipelight version 0.2.3 introduces new security concepts for using Windows plugins on Linux -- this includes EXPERIMENTAL sandbox support and an easier way to update to the current version of plugins. Since the number of supported plugins and Pipelight users is increasing the topic security got much more important and we started to develop new mechanisms to lower the surface for attacks. We will of course still provide regular pipelight updates, especially for security critical stuff (0.2.2 for example was only a security update containing a new version for flash and some minor bug fixes), but we wanted to improve this even more

The most common way to install Pipelight on Ubuntu is by using our PPA or to be more precise to use two PPAs since the Wine build of Erich E. Hoover is required by Pipelight. Since we are working together with Erich E. Hoover the division in two PPAs was more some kind of artificial restriction caused by the PPA system, but did not really represent the way we shared patches and code. Recently we decided to merge our work into a single new PPA so that is no longer needed to add two PPAs and moreover allows us to update packages more easily. The disadvantage of this change is that Launchpad does not allow us to redirect users from an old PPA to a new one and this step requires manual user intervention. The required instructions in order to switch to the new PPA are as follows

First you need to remove the two PPA's if you have already installed previous versions of pipelight

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:mqchael/pipelight
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ehoover/compholio

Now install the new PPA using the following commands

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pipelight

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2 Responses

  1. frank says:

    Is there another step after this ? I performed the above steps but it still doesn’t work . I’m very new to ubuntu so i feel they may be some simple step after this to complete installation i just not familiar with .

  2. Scot says:

    Thank you for this information! Installation worked like a charm. Now I can stream RedBox Instant movies in a Chromium browser on my Mythbuntu HTPC (after switching the browser agent to Firefox)

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