mmemuar ;)

If, like me, you can't go more then 24 hours without taking care of your panda, but sometimes you find yourself having access to a Linux-only machine, here is a solution for you! ;)

Flash on Linux is somewhat buggy (both the Firefox plugin and the standalone player) in that it refuses to connect properly to a remote server in games like pandanda. They'll probably fix it some day, but for the time being here's a workaround: use standalone flash player for windows via wine.

Sounds odd, but works. First download the mac+win bundle of flash players, extract the (non-debug) version of FlashPlayer.exe, run it via wine and point it to a problematic flash game, ..., profit!

Since this is for a kid who doesn't like too much typing and clicking, I've added a desktop shortcut, which in my case executes the following string: wine ~/.wine/FlashPlayer.exe http://play.pandanda.com/pandanda.swf.

Interestingly this also seems to work (although with more graphical glitches, like not displaying the password input box unless you click/tab-press into it) with Nickelodeon's Petpet Park (or neopets, beats me what the official name is). The proper flash URL for it would be: http://www.petpetpark.com/games/PPP.R24.swf

(I'm using the Live HTTP Headers Firefox addon to extract those URLs.)