HOWTO: Flash in x86_64 Linux
January 15th, 2008Adobe has, for whatever reason, never released a 64-bit version of Flash. Thankfully, the 32-bit Firefox works just fine in 64-bit Linux – which means we can use the Flash player in spite of their short-sighted decision.
I know there are dozens of ways to do this. Here’s what works for me quick-and-easy in Fedora 8 (although it should work with most other flavors of Linux too):
1. Download the latest i686 (32-bit) version from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/
2. “Install” Firefox as follows:
# uncompress and untar it... tar zxvf firefox-2.0.0.11.tar.gz # move the resulting firefox directory to /usr/local mv firefox /usr/local/ # make sure it works... cd /usr/local/firefox ./firefox # close the browser for now...
On one of my workstations I didn’t already have the i386 version of compat-libstdc++ installed (which caused Firefox to complain about a missing libstdc++.so.5). Easy fix for that:
yum install compat-libstdc++-33.i386
3. Download the latest Flash player in tar.gz format from: http://www.adobe.com
4. “Install” Flash as follows:
# uncompress and untar it... tar zxvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz # give the resulting directory a shorter, more proper name... mv install_flash_player_9_linux flash # move it to /usr/local mv flash /usr/local # set up the needed symbolic link for firefox to find and use flash... cd /usr/local/firefox/plugins/ ln -s /usr/local/flash/libflashplayer.so libflashplayer.so
5. Use your menu editor (in my case the KDE Menu Editor) to make sure the correct firefox gets launched from the menu. If you already had a version of firefox installed, it’s probably already set to use:
/usr/bin/firefox
Just change that to be:
/usr/local/firefox/firefox
6. Done! Launch Firefox and visit a site that uses Flash, such as youtube.com and enjoy.
Note: It is likely that you will need elevated privileges for the directory moving and symbolic linking operations. I simply do the whole thing as root to make it easy.