Macromedia, the makers of such programs as “Flash”, “Dreamweaver”, “Fireworks” and other web development tools, has just announced a release of Flash 7 for Linux.
Nothing indicates that a platform has reached mainstream then when the big boys start porting their applications over to it.
You can read the press release from Macromedia here.
In short, it means that Linux web browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, Konqueror, Epiphany, Galeon and more will be able to display and run the latest Flash page content as well or better then their windows using brothers (and sisters).

They (MacroMedia) also recently helped with getting their Studio MX software to run under WINE, the Linux/Windows compatability layer that allows many Windows programs to run in Linux. They have said that it is likely this will lead to Linux native versions of their software in the future.

So Linux may well become the platform of choice for Web developers, not only do you get good free applications like Quanta, Gimp, Screem, Mozilla Composer and more, you will now also have a choice of commercial packages as well. (If MacroMedia release Studio MX for Linux, you can bet Adobe would not be far behind with Photoshop.)
Not only that, but Linux distros come standard with Perl, PHP, MySQL and the Apache web server, so you can test and develop your scripts before uploading them to your Web host. (who is also likely running some version of Unix or Linux.).

I’m plan to do a tute soon detailing how to make use of all the free tools for Web development work on Linux to save yourself thousands of dollars buying commerial packages to do the same thing. People are spending a ton of money buying expensive packages like Photoshop, when they could use the GIMP or ImageMagick for free and achieve exactly the same result. I think thats information worth knowing don’t you?

regards

This article was posted on Monday, May 31st, 2004 at 1:42 am