Finally someone came up with a way to watch Netflix on Linux. The Official workaround is Ubuntu only, but the Archlinux community has repackaged the software, which consists on the Windows version of Mozilla Firefox and a patched wine with Silverlight support.
For installing you can go 2 ways:
1- Get it from the repository
Add the following to /etc/pacman.conf:
[archnetflix] Server = http://demizerone.com/$repo/community/$arch[demz-repo-community] Server = http://demizerone.com/$repo/$arch
Both the database and the packages are signed, so you will have to add my key to pacman’s trusted key list.
# pacman-key -r 0EE7A126
verify it using the info below and then sign it with the local master key:
# pacman-key --lsign-key 0EE7A126
next, update your pacman database
# pacman -Syy
and install the netflix script,
# pacman -S netflix-desktop
2- Install it from the AUR
Using your favorite AUR helper (Complete list here, I recommend packer) do:
packer -S netflix-desktop
This will pull all the dependencies and compile the software (this compilation takes a LONG time, I have a ThinkPad with i5 processor and 8gb of ram, and took like an hour)
IMPORTANT: If you install the AUR version and later decide to use the repository, you have to REMOVE the netflix-desktop package from your system including the dependencies to avoid any problems later, then you can go ahead and reinstall the package using the repository version.
So, what’s the difference between the AUR version and the repository version?
The repository version has precompiled packages so you don’t have to compile them yourself
For more information you can check the Un-Official Arch Netflix repo
Wish I had found this like an hour ago before I started compiling from the AUR. Thanks anyway.
well you will have to recompile on every update, so you can still set up the repo to avoid the long compile time in the future. If you are going to do it, make sure you remove the AUR package first, as they are not interchangeable. Thanks for reading!
I just followed the directions and I get this error;
error: failed retrieving file ‘archnetflix.db’ from demizerone.com : The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found
error: failed to update archnetflix (download library error)
from reading the Arch forum here:
I can see that the repo URL has changed, please update it with this:
[demz-repo-community]
Server = http://demizerone.com/$repo/$arch
and check again!
if It works I will updated the article.
Well, I’m no Joe, but I can tell you [demz-repo-community]
Server = http://demizerone.com/$repo/$arch works and the old one doesn’t. Thank you very much!
The only problem I have now is that I get this error everytime I try to install netflix-desktop
“error: netflix-desktop: signature from “Jesus Alvarez ” is invalid
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/netflix-desktop-0.6.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n] “
makes sense, since he is no longer maintaining the package! (hence the URL change) see here for more info: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1266436#p1266436
So for this situation it is ok to continue with the unsigned packages. If I happen to find the new keys or maintainers I will post them here.
Ok. But how do you continue with the unsigned packages? When I select NO on the delete question, i still get: Errors occured, No packages were updated, so its not installed… 🙁
Pipelight is now a good option for watching Neflix on Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight
I had to remove the version of wine-silverlight that came from netflix-desktop and build from source, which takes a long while, but it works great with Chrome.