TechnologyCrowd

Last week I posted a review of ESPN360.com and how happy I was to be able to watch tons of out of market games for free online.  One thing that I failed to mention is that the official website states that ESPN360 is only available for Windows and Mac users, so Linux is not on the officially supported list.  Since I have a dual boot system, I always have the option of restarting in Vista, but it seemed like it should be able to play in Linux.

I spent a couple hours searching and trying some different things and ended up getting it to work in Ubuntu Karmic using WINE.  It is a bit buggy and not as smooth as the Windows version, but if you don’t have Windows or Mac or don’t want to logout of Linux, the following steps should get you up and running in Ubuntu.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the latest version of WINE, I used the Ubuntu Software Center to install the Beta release of WINE 1.2.  After WINE is installed you need to go to mozilla from your normal Linux browser (I used Firefox) to download the Windows version of Firefox which can be found here. After I clicked on the English (US) version for my region, the following box opened up.

After clicking OK the installation process will take place and then open Firefox in WINE.  Next I went to ESPN360.com, the first thing that appeared was a message indicating that a plugin was missing for the FlashPlayer required for some of the graphics on the page.  After clicking on the “install missing plugin” message at the top of the page the following box appeared for the version of Flash to be installed.

After Flash was installed I clicked on “Watch Live” for one of the games, another window popped up and indicated that the Move Player needed to be installed.

After I received the message above, I clicked on the Begin Install box and the box below popped up indicating that the file would be installed.  I clicked on Save File in the box below to install Move Media Player.

At this point I ran into some trouble, after the supposed installation of the Move Player, Firefox crashed on me.  I was using an older version of WINE so hopefully that was the cause of the problem and you be able to see the live games at this point.  If it is still not working, one other step that I did was to manually install the Move Player with the the WINE loader, I went to my downloads folder where I previously tried to install the Move Player without WINE and right clicked on the file and opened with WINE as seen in the screen shot below.

Since I had closed Firefox before trying this I had to start it again using the same process that you will use after the installation.  Go to Applications -> WINE -> Mozilla Firefox to start Firefox within WINE, go to ESPN360 and click on a game to watch.

As I stated earlier, it does seem to be a bit buggy, but it does work pretty well.  When I first got to the live games screen, I did not see the Syracuse game that I wanted to watch which I knew was available from my Windows version.  After clicking on a couple other games first, it suddenly appeared and once I clicked on it everything worked fine.

The controls for fast forwarding seemed a little shaky at times and sometimes the pictures of other games below the screen were there and sometimes they were not.  The stats in the box on the right did not seem to be updating but the scores and section 140 comments and schedule were accurate.  Most importantly the video was working well in the box and also when I went to full screen, so if you need to watch ESPN360 in Linux, WINE should do the trick.  Not only am I able to watch ESPN360 without rebooting to Windows, the Orange is up by almost 20 so it is a good day!