# Installing and Configuring Gnash

There are two ways of installing Gnash: using a package manager, or installing from source.

## Requirements

Before downloading and installing Gnash, check that your hardware and software meet the following requirements.

### Hardware Requirements

One of the goals of Gnash is to make it portable enough to install on small devices. As a result, the hardware requirements are minimal. Gnash has even run on an ARM9 at 200 MHz with 32 MB of RAM! (It ran without video support in this case.) While firm minimums have not been established, Gnash has been shown to run successfully with the following:

- 336 MHz processor

- 128 MB RAM

- Gnash will run on anything from a raw frame buffer up to an OpenGL-supporting graphics card.

The following table provides a list of the Operating System/CPU combinations on which Gnash has been shown to run.

#### Build Matrix

Operating System | Processor
--- | ---
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD | Alpha AXP, AMD64, i386, Itanium, PC-98, PowerPC, SPARC64
Debian | Alpha AXP, AMD64, ARM, hppa, i386, Itanium, MIPS, PowerPC, IBM zSeries (s390), SPARC
Fedora | x86-32, x86-64, Geode GX, Geode LX
Gentoo | AMD64, PowerPC, SPARC, x86
Maemo 2.1 | i385, ARMv5t
Scratchbox | i386, ARMv5t
Access Linux Platform | i386, ARMv5t
Mandriva | i386, x86-64, MIPS
Open Embedded, OpenMoko | ARM
YellowDog Linux 6 | PowerPC, PS3
OpenSuSE 10 | i586, x86-64
Red Hat Enterprise, CentOS | x86-32, x86-64
Ubuntu | x86-64, x86-32, PowerPC, UltraSPARC
Haiku | i386
Syllable | i386
Irix 6.5 | MIPS R10K
Darwin (MacOS X) | PowerPC and x86-32
Windows XP, Windows Vista | x86-32

### Software Requirements

The &appversion; release of Gnash has been designed to run on UNIX/Linux variants, and has been run on most of the free ones. However, Gnash has successfully run on Windows, Darwin (Mac OS X), Irix, Solaris, BeOs, OS/2, and Haiku. Gnash has also run on the following 64-bit systems: PowerPC, Itanium, UltraSparc, and AMD64. For now, it is important to be sure that the following code, testing, and documentation dependencies are met before installing Gnash. If you will be downloading Gnash with a package manager, these dependencies may be solved by the package manager. Otherwise, you must first verify that each of these dependencies are installed on the target system.

## Downloading Gnash

There are two ways to download Gnash: using a package manager or by downloading the source code and building it on your system. If possible, it is advisable to use a package manager to download Gnash, as it will resolve dependencies for you. However, if you want the very latest features, or a Gnash package is not available for your operating system, it is better to download the source code and build Gnash locally.

### Getting the Source

Gnash is available as a release tarball, a development checkout, or a development snapshot.

#### Releases

The source can be acquired from a GNU FTP Mirror. The release version is intended to be stable, and is probably your best choice if the release took place recently. If you need features or fixes which were introduced after the release, consider a CVS checkout or the daily snapshot.

To download, select a mirror near you, then choose the `gnash` directory.

#### Snapshot

The daily development snapshot can be downloaded from http://www.gnashdev.org/dev_snapshots/. This is the best option if you need changes which were introduced after the last release of Gnash, but are unable to download directly from the repository.

#### Repository

The latest development sources are available via anonymous CVS. This is recommended if you need features or bug fixes which were introduced after the last release. Look at the daily snapshot if you experience difficulty accessing the repository.

To download via anonymous CVS, first set the environment variable `CVS_RSH` to `ssh`, then check out the source code. The example below uses the GNU Bourne-Again shell (bash):

    	    export CVS_RSH="ssh"
    	    cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/gnash co gnash

It is also possible to browse the repository on the web.

### Getting Codec Support

Gnash requires codec support to handle audio and video correctly. Some platforms like Ubuntu or Fedora under the GNOME desktop will automatically notify the user that the proper codecs aren't installed, and pop up a dialog box to let the user download the codecs Gnash needs to make site like YouTube work correctly. If you have installed Gnash on any other platform, and video doesn't work, it's highly likely you need to install the proper codecs. For most platforms, this is the Gstreamer-ffmpeg plugin, available from your distributions repository.