Adobe Flash Player for Linux Tips and Tricks
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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

* Flash 10 Release Candidate 3: September 15th, 2008

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. 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.

2. /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.

3. nspluginwrapper-1.1.0 introduced WMODE support for the first time.  It requires a patch
   to work without crashing with Flash 10.  This patch has been pushed as nspluginwrapper-1.1.0-5.fc9
   in Fedora 9 updates.  RHEL5 and Fedora 8 (with nspluginwrapper) remain unaffected because it uses an older WMODE-less nspluginwrapper.

4. 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

5. Fedora 8+ requires an updated libcurl to fix a problem with curl's NSS implementation that caused Flash
   crashes.  Upgrade and that particular problem will go away.

6. 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