Netflix finally comes to Linux! (Sort of...)

Netflix's reluctance to support playback on Linux computers is infamous notorious ridiculous well documented. Well, while the company isn't ready to officially start streaming to your Ubuntu box, you can gain access to its vast library with a specially patched version of Wine. For those of you that don't know, Wine is a compatibility layer that allows Windows apps to run under Linux. Fire up the Windows version of Firefox with this version of the software, install Microsoft's Silverlight and voilà -- Netflix on Linux. Unfortunately, that makes the whole ordeal sound a lot simpler than it is. For the moment you'll need to download Wine from its Git repository, then download and apply five different patches. Then you'll have to download and install Firefox 14.0.1 and Silverlight 4, neither of which are the current (read: easy to find) versions. So far the hack is only confirmed to work on the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 12.10, but we imagine getting it up and running on other distros shouldn't be too difficult. The work around should get easier once the crafty devs get a PPA up and running that will streamline installation. If you're the impatient type you can hit up the source link to get complete instructions.

Filed under: Software, HD

Netflix finally comes to Linux! (Sort of...) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 17 Nov 2012 01:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.