LinuxQuestions.org - NetFlix on Slackware

If you want to do this the manual way (without using Netflixplayer.tar.gz), you can grab the patches (000[1-6]*.patch) from here, and wine_multilib_winegcc.patch (if you use Slackware64 with multilib) and wine_winebuild-CCAS.patch from here, and apply the patches, in that order, to the wine source before building it. prelink is an optional dependency...I tried both with and without, and ended up using the prelink-enabled build...but any performance increase may have just been the placebo effect. To build wine, I just took cues from Alien Bob's SlackBuild (while I usually write SlackBuilds for everything, I decided to just keep netflix as a local build in $HOME). After patching:

Code:

$ autoreconf -vif

$ export SLKCFLAGS="-O2 -fPIC"

$ CCAS="as" \

CFLAGS="$SLKCFLAGS" \

CXXFLAGS="$SLKCFLAGS" \

LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib -ldl" \

./configure \

  --prefix=/usr \

  --localstatedir=/var \

  --sysconfdir=/etc \

  --mandir=/usr/man \

  --with-x \

  --with-opengl \

  --program-prefix= \

  --program-suffix= \

  --build=x86_64-slackware-linux

$ make depend

$ make

$ make DESTDIR=$HOME/Apps/netflix/out install

You could, of course, change the directory structure (I was too lazy, so I have $HOME/Apps/netflix/out/usr/...), and you could just customize Alien's SlackBuild to install alongside a real wine installation if you want.

To setup Firefox/Silverlight, see the first post here (ignoring the wine-building stuff since that is done). Make sure you pass the full path to the wine binaries if you didn't install it system-wide. The fstab modification is important (or so I've read -- I didn't actually try running netflix without it, but multiple sources indicate that the filesystem containing the wine binary and/or the user's wine directory should be mounted with user_xattr. Since both are on /home for me, I only mounted /home with user_xattr). That post describes the easiest possible way to download/install Firefox and Silverlight, and to disable updates of both. I did not install winetricks but I already had MS webcore fonts installed.

I used a separate wine prefix just for Netflix (google for how to setup a non-default wine prefix...). To launch Netflix (I set Netflix as the home page in the wine Firefox browser) I use the following command (in a script):

Code:

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-netflix ~/Apps/netflix/out/usr/bin/wine ~/.wine-netflix/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/firefox.exe

It all works very nicely, with the qualification that I have to switch out of and back into fullscreen mode (using F11) after starting any video to get rid of an annoying statusbar. After clicking on the video while playing, fullscreen buttons will not work, so you have to go out of/into fullscreen and THEN click on the video to gain focus (so you can control with the keyboard).

I really wish Netflix would release a real Linux solution but I don't think that'll happen any time soon. But, at least it works. I have a quad core AMD Phenom II X4 925 with an nVidia GTX 260 and after buffering it plays smoothly (it may stutter a bit for the first minute or so, and again if you move the mouse/press keyboard buttons). I have no idea how it would run on a slower system.