Install Netflix on Ubuntu via Wine

UPDATE: (Sept. 2014) – Netflix will soon natively support Ubuntu, there are only a few small hurdles remaining, likely to be resolved by the NSS update expected in Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic). A workaround is available for the impatient… http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/08/netflix-linux-html5-support-plugins.

For various reasons primarily related to DRM, there is not a native Ubuntu/Linux viewer for Netflix… this is one of the cases where WINE can help you out by providing (not emulating) a Windows environment.

These commands are for the Ubuntu setup, similar steps for other Linux distributions are available in the references.

I’ve found that it is better to pre-install the Wine Gecko and Wine Mono packages on Ubuntu.


sudo apt-get install wine-gecko
sudo apt-get install wine-mono

Then…

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install netflix-desktop

If you’ve never used WINE before within your Ubuntu/Linux environment, you’ll likely need to let it download the extensions for Windows, I believe that it will request to download and install the Gecko and Mono packages described above, click "Yes" if asked and all should go well!

REFERENCES:

Windows Tools for reading NTFS and Linux partitions

I’ve had to do my share of hard-drive recoveries over the years and have found the tools provided by DiskInternals to be invaluable in several occurances.

I’d previously used their NTFS Reader software to recover files from bad partitions after multi-booting to an older Windows operating system drive on the same machine.

Now I’ve found that they offer an EXT2/EXT3 Reader to allow Windows to access Linux partitions.

This is great for less-technical users that experience fatal errors in their operating systems as there’s now a relatively simple way to access the ‘familiar’ Windows tooling to recover files on the ‘bad’ partition. For the power-user, this affords a means for people making the switch to Linux a means in which to access their files in Windows in the off chance that they have to use software not usable under WINE.

Product Pages:

NOTE: Similar tooling exists to read Mac HPFS partitions, that topic saved for a later post!

Cheers!

WINE Is Not an Emulator

I post a lot about open source applications, WINE is another notable contender as it gives users an option to run many mainstream Window applications on a Linux (even Apple’s OS/X variant) platform by providing access to the Windows API’s to those host operating systems.

http://www.winehq.org/
http://appdb.winehq.org/ – List of applications supported

Ah, for those of you still running IBM’s OS/2 platform, you too can run Win32 applications with Odin:
http://odin.netlabs.org/

Cheers!