Pipelight 0.2.0
Written for Pipelight by Michael Müller on 2013-10-14
We jumped from version 0.1-4 to 0.2.0 (the version scheme changed a bit) since this release includes some fundamental changes in the way Pipelight works. The most obvious improvement is multi-plugin support, so that Pipelight can not only handle Silverlight but also other windows plugins like for example Flash (and some more in the near future). The following text should give you a short summary about all changes:
--[Multi-plugin support]--
The Pipelight package is now only a meta package which installs the new pipelight-multi package and enables Silverlight. This way was chosen to stay compatible with old installations, but has the disadvantage that using the new pipelight-multi commands while having the pipelight package installed may cause weird behavior in some cases. It is therefore recommended to use only the multi package if you want to use more than one plugin. An upgrade can easily be done by executing:
sudo apt-get remove pipelight
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pipelight-multi
sudo pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight
The currently supported plugins are Silverlight and Flash which both seem to work very well, but we are also working on other plugins like the Unity 3D webplayer and Widevine.
We also implemented the possibility to enable plugins on a per user basis instead of having to do this system wide. Depending on whether the pipelight-plugin script is executed with root rights or not the plugin is either enabled for all users or only the current user.
For example this commands enables flash for all users
sudo pipelight-plugins --enable flash
while the following command only enables it only for the user executing it:
pipelight-plugins --enable flash
More information on how to enable / disable plugins or how you can tell your Browser to use the windows flash version, take a look at: https:/
--[Easier Silverlight version switching]--
You can now switch the Silverlight version with just one command and it's no longer necessary to edit configuration files for this. Pipelight handles the Silverlight versions as different plugins and you can for example switch from the current Silverlight version to 5.0 by executing:
sudo pipelight-plugins --disable silverlight --enable silverlight5.0
The "silverlight" plugin is an alias to the latest version which is currently silverlight5.1. You can also enable multiple versions of the same plugin, but this shouldn't make much sense in the most cases.
--[Installation of plugins]--
The installation process of the required plugins files is now more visible to the user. You will see dialogs during the installation which will inform you about the current process so that it is more clear that your browser is not frozen, but paused because the installation is still in progress. This is especially useful if you are using multiple plugins at the same time as the installation process can take several minutes. The only disadvantage of the new installation method is that if you upgrade from an older version without multi-plugin support a reinstallation of Silverlight will be triggered.
Since we also changed the configuration file names, all existing installations will be upgraded to Silverlight 5.1 irrespective of the fact that the old configuration may have a different Silverlight version set. Unfortunately you will have to redo the corresponding changes again if you experience problems (take a look at the updated FAQ entries).
--[Other changes]--
We also did a lot of code clean up/rewrite and moreover fixed some small bugs.
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If you want to see all the changes in detail please take a look at the the full changelog:
https:/
