Netflix Desktop provides a convenient tool that downloads and installs all of the components necessary to run Netflix Watch Instantly under Wine, including the Windows version of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Silverlight v4. This package also includes some convience settings to integrate Netflix into Firefox in such a way that everything feels like a native Ubuntu application.
Currently, Wine does not include all of the necessary patches to use Netflix "out of the box", so the PPA below also contains a custom build of Wine with the patches included (see the Wine 'Compholio Edition'). It is important to note that this build is not compatible with "vanilla" Wine, so installing the package will uninstall any existing Wine installation. I plan to change this in the near future, but this was the easiest way to get Netflix up and running for everyone.
Neither this package or its author is affliated with, endorsed, provided, or supported in any way by Netflix, Inc.
I have an Ubuntu PPA setup, so you can add ppa:ehoover/compholio to your Software Sources to automatically obtain updates. To do that simply run the following in a terminal window:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio
Once you've done that then all you need to do is install netflix-desktop.
On some systems it's necessary to add a special mounting flag to gain extended attribute support, to do that you'll want to edit your fstab to add support for the extended filesystem attributes. To do that you want to edit the fstab file as root:
sudo gedit /etc/fstaband modify the fourth column of your primary filesystem (designated by "/" in the second column) to have ",user_xattr". The result should look something like this:
UUID=94f7fc1e-fa27-4b24-99f3-4b461665a4a4 / ext4 errors=remount-ro,user_xattr 0 1 # /dev/sda1
After you've done that just remount your main filesystem:
sudo mount -o remount /
Netflix and Netflix Watch Instantly are trademarks of Netflix, Inc. Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox are trademarks of the Mozilla Corporation. Microsoft and Microsoft Silverlight are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation.
