How to get Live Video from Fox News on Ubuntu

Lately a bunch of sites have been moving from Flash to either Silverlight or Adobe AIR for their video feeds. Unfortunately, neither are officially supported yet on the Linux platform in general, or on Ubuntu in particular (that said, there is a lot of hard work being done to change this: check out mono and Adobe AIR for Linux).

Its easy to feel left behind. For example, I wanted to watch the live feed from foxnews.com on the huricane Ike. Unfortunately, it requires Adobe AIR. What could I do? I'm not one to feel sorry for myself, so I figured I'd do some hacking and tinkering around and see if I could get it to work anyway. And I did! Here is what you need to do:
  1. First, download the alpha of Adobe AIR for Linux here.
  2. Using the command line navigate to the download, and type: chmod 755 adobeair_linux_*.bin
  3. Type: ./adobeair_linux_*.bin [this will execute gksu automatically]
  4. Follow the directions. Once it is installed: close and restart Firefox [I'm not sure this step is necessary, but its not going to hurt]
  5. To install the Fox News Live Adobe AIR application, go to http://www.foxnews.com/video2/FoxNewsLive.air
  6. It should ask you if it can open it with Adobe AIR. Say yes. Follow the directions and it should work!
By default, it installs it in /opt/FOX News Live/. If you want to re-start the application, navigate to this directory and run the following command: ./FOX\ News\ Live

You can delete the applications in Synamptic Package Manager

To uninstall Adobe AIR: dpkg -r adobeair-enu

Although it seems somewhat choppy, it works. Hope this helps somebody!

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Awesome!! thanks!!
It was bugging the crap out of me.. foxnews live is mine baby!
2:24 PM
Anonymous said…
Thanks! This worked for me on Suse 11.0
1:37 PM
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