DuoCoding: Coding together

As an active Firefox user, I would like to share Prism with you. Prism is a so-called single site browser and runs each instance in a different, sandboxed process. Therefore it is useful for browsing heavyweight web applications. Tabbed browsers might slow down, when opening a webpage with many and/or large JavaScripts.

Prism allows you to browse web applications with an minimalistic user interface. Applications can be opened from the dock or a shortcut on the desktop. Just like normal applications!

This how-to installs prism from the binaries provided by Mozilla and not from the Ubuntu repository. The version in the Ubuntu repository is a bit out of date and therefore it misses some essential features.

First, we get the Prism binaries and move the folder to /usr/share/prism/.

mkdir prism
cd prism/
wget http://prism.mozilla.com/downloads/1.0b1/prism-1.0b1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2
tar --bzip2 -xf prism-1.0b1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2
sudo mv prism /usr/share/

Then its time to install the Flash Player. You need to install the Flash Player plug-in in each user directory, otherwise the Flash Player wouldn”t work for that user.

wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz
tar xfz install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz

for path in /home/*
do
 if [ -d "$path" ]
 then
 mkdir -p $path/.prism/plugins
 cp install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so $path/.prism/plugins/libflashplayer.so
 fi
done

After installing the Flash Player plugin, Prism is ready to use! You can now create shortcuts by running the following command:

/usr/share/prism

Enjoy the power of Prism!

Tags: Flash, How-to's, Prism, Ubuntu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 4:53 pm and is filed under How-to's, Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.