I've griped before about the lack of Flash Player version 8 or 9 on Linux platforms. Adobe is working on the issue, and significant progress has been made. More encouraging is the Adobe developer blogging about the progress of the project: Penguin SWF.

A beta version of Flash Player 9 for Linux was released on October 18th, and I'm happy to say it works quite well for me. There are still issues for folks on 64bit platforms, but hopefully those will be worked out in time. (It looks like it may be up to the distros to package the necessary 32bit libraries as dependencies).

Even more encouraging is the developer's preference for Gentoo!