Netflix on Debian Wheezy 64bit


netflix on
debian

Thanks to ehoover's excellent packages and the grandness of Wine and other good forces of the Linux world, I got Netflix up and running on my 64 bit Debian Wheezy box yesterday.

The mentioned packages are made for Ubuntu, so there were a few caveats. I got pretty far thanks to this great thread on the Crunchbang forums, but had to do a wee bit more, hence this article.

First off, my system is 64bit, so I couldn't use the packages for the suggested quantal as these were (at the time of writing) only available for 32bit. Of course, I could add i386 as an additional architecture, but I didn't want to go there, hence I used the packages from oneiric instead.

Getting the netflix and custom wine packages

I added this to my/etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ehoover/compholio/ubuntu oneiric main

I could then install thenetflix-desktop package, as well as thettf-mscorefonts-installer:

# apt-get install netflix-desktop ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Getting the required Windows fonts

For some reason, I had to re-run the font installer after setting the EULA selection (I had already run the installer and accepted the EULA long time ago):

# echo ttf-mscorefonts-installer msttcorefonts/accepted-mscorefonts-eula select true | debconf-set-selections
# apt-get install --reinstall ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Running the netflix-desktop post-install hooks

When runningnetflix-desktop for the first time, it attempts to download some additional binaries, however, this didn't work on my system as it insists on using sudo and since I'm not using this, it keeps on failing. The remedy was easy, though:

# cd /usr/share/netflix-desktop
# ./download-missing-files
# ./install-fonts

Performance & conclusion

Netflix runs pretty well on my system. It does lag sometimes, but I see that it does this under Windows too, so I assume that's because of the internet connection.

As a yard stick, you may find it useful to know that I'm running Debian Wheezy, kernel 3.2.0-2-amd64, have 8GBs of RAM and an Intel i7-2640M 2.8 GHz CPU.

I've now watched two full length films and am very satisfied running Netflix on my Debian system. Thanks again to everyone in the community that has made this possible!


Licensed under CC BY Creative Commons License ~ ✉ torstein.k.johansen @ gmail ~ 🐘 @skybert@emacs.ch ~ 🐦 @torsteinkrause