Linux no longer Adobe’s least important platform!

Quite the contrary it seams: Adobe to release Flash 64bit first on Linux. True it is only the beta version, and the MS-Windows and Mac OS-X 64bit versions will follow shortly1, but still this demonstrates some serious commitment to Linux as an equal player in the desktop operating system market!

All we need now is Photoshop for Linux and we’re set 🙂

Installing the 64Bit flash plugin for Linux is painless although requires some command line experience:

There are no DEB or RPM packages yet, so to install this prerelease, download the 64bit Flash prerelease tarball and extract it. You should get a file named libflashplayer.so.

The next step is to remove your current installation of nspluginwrapper and flash-plugin (flashplugin-nonfree for Ubuntu/Debian users) using your system’s package manager.

After that is done, as root (sudo or su - as the case may be) copy the libflashplayer.so file to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins and restart your browser.

And that’s it! in Firefox, open a new tab and type about:plugins to check if Flash was installed successfully – you should see an entry named “Shockwave Flash” if the install was successful (on my system it appears the first on the list – above the “Null plugin”).

Currently my short experience with the new Flash plugin is very good – no crashes yet, and the dreaded gray “nspluginwrapper has crashed” blocks are a history. Yay!

  1. i.e. its been almost two weeks since the Linux release and there is no Windows version yet []

One Response to “Linux no longer Adobe’s least important platform!”

  1. Adam s:

    Finally ! i hated that it wasn’t supported in Firefox (so really – now firefox could install flash as a plugin w/o 1) going to the website, 2) download it 3) run the exec 4) restart the firefox?)

    good post,
    –a

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