Re: HAL

[Sven Hartge <sven@svenhartge.de>]

Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Monday 28 December 2015 00:59:38 Sven Hartge wrote:
>> Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> Is there any way I can install HAL in Jessie?  Or do I need to wipe
>>> it, and reinstall Wheezy on the box on which I need HAL?

>> The real question is: "Why do you need HAL?"

> Because, criminal offence though I fully understand it to be, I want
> to use my television to watch UK Channel 4 catch-up TV and Amazon
> Prime Video.  For that I need the computer attached to my television
> to run Flash-player.

> I know that I can get the setup running in Wheezy.  The question is
> whether I can do so it Jessie.  But the stumbling block, I think is
> that I need HAL.

> As I say, I know that such behaviour is a criminal offence, so please,
> people, can we not go there.

Problem is, and I think you know this, HAL has been deprecated since
quite a long time and is no longer available or even compatible with a
reasonably modern Linux system.

But I see there is a package named libhal1-flash available from
Christian Marillat in his deb-multimedia.org repository. It contains the
code from https://github.com/cshorler/hal-flash.

The package description says it is exactly for the purpose you intent to
use it:

,----
| Description: Compatibility library to allow playback of flash DRM content
|  The Adobe Flash web browser plugin for Linux relies upon libhal to provide
|  information required by libadobecp (which libflashplayer.so retrieves from
|  the internet) for playing back drm content.
|  
|  Since HAL is no longer centric to most modern Linux systems (now we have
|  UDev, UDisks etc) - I'm only really providing this library because I see a
|  growing trend in the UK: ITV, Lovefilm and others are now using Silverlight
|  rather than Flash for their drm streams. Currently Silverlight DRM
|  protected content isn't supported on Linux (I'd like to see this change - I
|  have nothing against Silverlight).
`----

I think this may solve your problems without frankensteining your Debian
installation.

Grüße,
Sven.

-- 
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.