Adobe Flash Player for Linux Tips and Tricks ============================================= This site contains usage tips and workarounds important to Adobe Flash Player Linux users. Important Links * Adobe's Blog about Flash Player for Linux * Adobe Flash Player Administration Guide * 64bit Flash 10.0.20.7: November 17th, 2008 Prerelease of 64bit native plugin for Linux. Install this libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins and remove your existing 32biit plugin. In my testing it seems to be equally as buggy as the 32bit plugin in nspluginwrapper. Without nspluginwrapper I haven't found a single thing that makes it consistently crash yet, although I do see a few bugs. Be sure you have alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.x86_64 and libcurl.x86_64 installed. See Adobe's Release Notes for 64bit. * Flash 10.0.12.36: October 15th, 2008 Be warned that Flash 10 requires glibc-2.4 or higher. You must have i386 libcurl installed or the plugin will fail. RHEL3 and RHEL4 are no longer supported by Flash 10. Adobe issued security updates for Flash 9 as 9.0.151.0 for RHEL3 and RHEL4. Download RPM from Adobe You may download the tarball, RPM, or Yum config from: Adobe's Flash Download Site Flash 10 Tips, IMPORTANT if you want it to actually work 1. If you are running 64bit Fedora or RHEL5, you must install nspluginwrapper.i386 and nspluginwrapper.x86_64 for it to work. 64bit Fedora does not install nspluginwrapper.i386 by default. 2. You also need alsa-lib.i386 and alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i386. 3. A bug in firefox/xulrunner causes the browser to crash (even with nspluginwrapper) with "windowless" WMODE plugins like Flash Player 10. This was fixed in firefox-3.0.2. You really should upgrade firefox anyway because it contains security fixes. 4. /etc/adobe/mms.cfg WindowlessDisable=true It is recommended that you use this workaround because there remain other WMODE bugs between firefox, nspluginwrapper and the plugin. This makes things a little more stable. 5. nspluginwrapper-1.1.0 introduced WMODE support for the first time, but it was broken. You must upgrade to at least nspluginwrapper-1.1.2 which fixes a few WMODE problems and other bugs that would make Flash 10 crash. Here are packages for Fedora. 6. Flash 10 requires either libcurl.so.3 or libcurl.so.4 or it will refuse to load. Be sure libcurl.i386 is installed on your system. yum install libcurl.i386 7. Fedora 8+ requires an updated libcurl to fix a problem with curl's NSS implementation that caused Flash crashes. Install all updates and this particular problem will go away. 8. Remove libflashsupport as it is no longer needed for anything with Flash 10, and it might even be the cause of crashes. FAQ Also check out the Adobe's Flash Player Support Center for help. 1. Where is Flash for x86-64 or PowerPC Linux? After years of waiting, it sounds like one of their engineers is working on it at least unofficially. Contact Adobe and express your opinion if you truly care about this. 2. What if I use Debian? Install flashplugin-nonfree from Debian contrib unstable. If this fails, you must seek help from the Debian community. 3. What if I use Gentoo? emerge netscape-flash If this fails, you must seek help from the Gentoo community. 4. What if I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux? RHEL distributes flash-plugin on the Extras CD, which is essentially the same package from Adobe. RHEL3's flash-plugin package contains libflashsupport in order to output sound via the operating system's OSS drivers, since flash-plugin itself is only capable of ALSA sound. 5. As reported on Adobe's Linux blog in May 2008, Flash 10 has native 3D hardware acceleration, except due to driver bugs they blacklisted anything with a client glx vendor string of SGI. Unfortunately, Intel seems to report "SGI" here. I was told that mms.cfg option "OverrideGPUValidation = 1" will override their blacklist. Adobe wrote this new blog entry about this. See the Adobe Flash Player Administration Guide to learn how to use /etc/adobe/mms.cfg. Info This site used to host RPM and yum/apt repositories of Adobe Flash Player. Adobe has since taken over the job of RPM packaging and providing a yum repository. Get the adobe-release package from Adobe to install their yum config and GPG key. Warren Togami warren@togami.com