Pipelight 0.2.6 released and Ubuntu PPA installation instructions included

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Pipelight is a special browser plugin which allows one to use windows only plugins inside Linux browsers. We are currently focusing on Silverlight, Flash, Shockwave and the Unity Webplayer. The project needs a patched version of Wine to execute the Silverlight DLL.

What is new in Pipelight 0.2.6

Pipelight 0.2.6 adds two new plugins and improves the currently supported plugins, especially Silverlight. Before we take a closer look at these changes, we would like to make two small announcements

--[Plugins]--

We added support for the ViewRight plugin which is used by some VOD services as DRM player. The plugin is only available in a re-branded version and often ships with some custom configuration in the installer. In this release we added the Caiway version of this plugin ("viewright-caiway"), but feel free to contact us if you are using a different VOD service.

The other new plugin is the Vizzed RGR which ships an emulator to play old games. It seemed to be a bit buggy in our tests, but feel free to activate "vizzedrgr" and test it.

--[64 bit]--

We added support for 64 bit plugins in Pipelight and it is now possible to play around with the 64 bit version of flash and unity3d. There are still many issues since the 64 bit plugins tend to hit more bugs in Wine than the 32 bit versions, but we already started to fix some of them. In the mean time these plugins are considered as experimental and you need to unlock them first ("x64-flash", "x64-unity3d"). In case you are compiling pipelight on your own, you need to pass "--with-win64" to configure.

We also had to change the Wine version on Ubuntu / Debian as our previous releases were 32 bit only. The only disadvantage is that the old installation is not automatically updated to the 64 bit capable version, so that you need to execute "sudo apt-get install wine-compholio:amd64" manually. Even if you want to stay with the 32 bit only version, you need to execute "sudo apt-get distupgrade" instead of a normal upgrade, since the new wine version is now split across multiple packages.

Note: You can not use a 64 bit only version of Wine as for example the installers of the plugins are 32 bit executable.

--[Compilers MinGW / WineG++]--

Pipelight uses MinGW to compile it's windows part causing problems with some distributions as they do not offer a cross compiler. This raised the question to support the WineG++ compiler as it just depends on a normal gcc, but using this compiler always resulted in broken executable. We were now able to track down the bug to a wrong alignment of doubles inside of structures with WineG++ and implemented a workaround. It is now possible to use WineG++ to compile the 32 bit version of pluginloader.exe and no cross compiler is needed any more (the 64 bit version is still broken).

--[Silverlight User Agent]--

The infamous user agent check of Silverlight always caused problems when a user agent other than Firefox was detected resulting in obscure errors like applications get stuck loading at 99%. We now implemented a hack to always return Firefox as User Agent to the plugin independently from what browser you are using. In the ideal case you should now be able to disable the user agent switcher in your browser. Anyway, some websites will still check the user agent with some kind of javascript before the plugin is loaded so that you still need to keep your user agent switcher, but you will be able to use for example a Chrome Windows user agent in Chrome. This is especially useful for websites like Maxdome which do not work as expect if you fake a Firefox User agent in Chrome.

Install Pipelight 0.2.6 on ubuntu

Open the terminal and run the following commands

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

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