Submitted by Adobe Systems has finally released the long-awaited Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux. This version of Flash Player was meant to be feature-comparable to Adobe’s latest Windows and Mac OS versions, and is the first version of Flash on Linux that really is just as good as the Windows and Mac OS versions. Additionally, a tutorial on how to install it on Ubuntu and on Fedora.
Flash Player 9 for Linux Arrives
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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that article is lying, one can use the plugin in konqueror (not that one would wish to contaminate ones system with that filth)
Dude ease up. yes the article’s author was mistaken. Konq can read plugins straight from the mozilla plugins directory with no problems, but “The article lies!” is a bit of a stretch. You’re also pushing it with the filth/contamination comments. For god’s sake calm down, smoke a cigarette, get laid or something.
i were quite easy on the author, however, my opinion on flash is quite clear, and for obvious reasons.
“””that article is lying, one can use the plugin in konqueror (not that one would wish to contaminate ones system with that filth)”””
While Konqueror is not my preferred browser, I would hardly call it “filth”.
While Konqueror is not my preferred browser, I would hardly call it “filth”.
I believe the poster was referring to flash as filth, not konq.
Does this player support Linux that runs on 64 bit platform?
As far as I know it is not native 64bit but can be run with nspluginwrapper.
PowerPC support?
Come on Adobe, free up the source so we can port it ourselves.
Right on!
Short answer: no. Long answer: Nope. More luck with Flash 10
Hopefully Flash 10 will support Linux on PPC as well.
Hey, I just thought, maybe a proliferation of Linux on the PS3 will help that effort along.
If you’re using KDE, Konqueror 64-bit will support 32-bit plugins, so no particular issues there. Works just fine on Suse 10.2 x86_64, anyways.
If it won’t run native 64 bit linux it’s crap!
Do you really need a 64bit web browser tbh? I think i’m happy allowing firefox stay as a 32bit app on my x86_64 installs.
a 32bit app on my x86_64 installs
The thought of hobbling my new workstation makes me want to self immolate, rather go without. Surprising yes, but there is actually life without flash. I think it’s a sad state of affairs when what started out as the universal access to information got bottled up in some lame proprietary format with such miserable support.
>>The thought of hobbling my new workstation makes me want to self immolate<<
How is running a 32bit app on a 64bit workstation going to hobble it? If anything the 32bit app would run faster then it’s 64bit equivalent as it’s binary is actually smaller.
What is the main benefit of 64bitness? The ability of a process to use over 4GB of ram mainly. I don’t see why I’d need a web-browser that can do that, do you?
Now if it was a Oracele database we were talking about then yeah, but come on. Likewise what magic advantage does a 64bit “ls” grant you? other then fact that the 64bit “ls” binary is larger the 32bit one.
“What is the main benefit of 64bitness? The ability of a process to use over 4GB of ram mainly. I don’t see why I’d need a web-browser that can do that, do you? ”
you probably don’t browse the web that often I guess
Unfortunately not.However you could make a 32-bit chroot as explained in the following tutorial:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=24575
No.
If it makes you feel better Adobe doesn’t support 64bit Windows either.
While Adobe is supposed to be working on 64bit flash (for both Windows and Linux), somehow I don’t see it happening any time soon.
In short, Gnash.
– Gilboa
1. Down tar.gz file
2. tar xvzf file.tar,gz
3. run ./flashplayer-installer
4. Done
An easy method for OpenSUSE or SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) users is to update through YAST or ZMD Updater.
I kinda like the lazy man’s method.
1. Go to youtube.com.
2. Click the “Install missing plugin” button
3. Watch as everything magically works.
There is another lazy method:
1. Go to astalavista.com
2. Click the “Yes”, “Install”, “Get Free Porn” etc buttons
3. Watch spyware happily ruins your system.
Don’t oversimplify tasks – you might regret it later.
Hmmm that might work….if
1) I were running Windows.
2) If Firefox were pulling it from anywhere besides straight from Adobe.
It works with gentoo, though it’s ugly to bypass portage that way :p
Why is it ugly? It doesn’t mess with your system whatsoever. It just drops the lib in ~/.firefox/plugins.
Because gentoo already has a package for the flash-plugin, that’s why. Not to mention that this kind of installing plugins makes it more difficult to tracks changes to my system. I really don’t like that
It works with gentoo, though it’s ugly to bypass portage that way :p
No need to do that. This release was available yesterday in portage.
In unstable, yes
what a cabbage
Yeah, but then you’ll have to delete your old Flash player first. Besides, it’ll only work in Firefox AFAIK.
haha, i just tried it, and i must say, if it works as good as the windows version, god have mercy on windows-users souls.
I just tried to install Flash via Synaptics about an hour ago, and still ended up with V7. I was even at the adobe web site and missed the version 9 string… doh… I just saw tar.gz and got bored, and gave up on viewing the webpage I originally set out trying to fix. To much effort for me. I’m glad though I wasted the 5 mins reading the instructions… One thing with my ubuntu, it refused the /usr/lib/mozilla path, had to use /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox
Doesn’t work here unfortunately. Crashes FireFox 2 straight away. Works fine with Mozilla 1.7.11 however.
That’s strange, it works fine with Firefox 2.0.0.1 here. What distro are you running?
I never thought I’d see the day that Flash Player would run on Linux. It’s nice to see a change in the way things are going, even if everything doesn’t work as planned. Adobe’s .0 releases rarely work correctly but it’s a good step.
Flash player has been working on Linux for years, it’s just been an old version… for years
That only means that it’s been running, not necessarily working, which is something common for Adobe software.
To make flash work in Opera, just untar the file you download from Adobe, and copy libflashplayer.so to Opera’s plugin directory. Works great in Ubuntu edgy, and i imagine it shouldn’t be much diferent for other distros.
Or You can just add ~/.mozilla/plugins path (or whatever path is used in Your setup) to ~/.opera/pluginpath.ini file (it works fine here, but i use only flash plugin, so i can’t be sure if all mozilla plugins work ok in Opera too).
Thanks to Macromedia/Adobe for porting flash to Linux. Now if only they could port it to BeOS/Haiku, Syllable, SkyOS, and other small systems…
.
I couldn’t decide whether to boycott Adobe, or boycott websites that use Flash. So I’m boycotting them both. Wake me up when the internet is once again usable with free software.
That is unfair….
The internet is fine, however, it is these muppets that design Flash websites that annoy me.
I wish I could round them up in a big room, get a big stick with nails in it. Then beat them all sensless with it.
No, wait.
I would need to dip the nails in dog shit first. So they get blood poisoning too.
Edited 2007-01-18 03:13
not really so unfair, if some morons had not invented flash, people wouldnt be using it. the fault is on the user and adobe(/macromedia)
Flash can be useful in a lot of contexts, a lot of people abuse it, I agree, but your entire stance is just hate for hate’s sake. If you don’t like flash, avoid flash sites, it’s that easy. For the rest of the world that wants to use flash, this is a good thing
If you’re boycotting sites that use Flash, why are you posting on this site? Or do you only mean non-advertising uses?
Edited 2007-01-18 06:30
I just installed it on Ubuntu Dapper from the tar.gz. The installer didn’t work, just hung and did nothing. So I installed it manually by “sudo cp *flashplayer* /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/” and it works a treat in both Firefox 2.0 and Epihany.
I am at this very moment happily listening to streaming audio on the flashplayer of Radio CKRZ “Voice of the Grand” listening to Iroquois social dance music and very good it is.
I had Flash 9 Beta installed but the final release seems even better.
I just installed it on Ubuntu Dapper from the tar.gz
Doesn’t Ubuntu have the same flashplugin-nonfree package as Debian?
On my Debian unstable it already fetched the Beta a couple of weeks ago during an upgrade
Doesn’t Ubuntu have the same flashplugin-nonfree package as Debian?
On my Debian unstable it already fetched the Beta a couple of weeks ago during an upgrade
Yes but I installed the 9 Beta from tar.gz before it was available on the Ubuntu updates. Again I have installed the new release using the tar.gz before update has the deb packgage for it.
In fact I installed two different versions of of the Beta, the first release was broken for some streaming audio so I switched back to 7. A later build of 9 Beta worked OK when I tried it and I think it is this build that was released for Debian and Ubuntu.
I for one welcome our new flash overlord.
p.S: Works fine on Suse 10 / FFox 2.0.0.1
Excellent Work adobe, finally a working flash plugin with ease of use (rpm).
This is the way to go for Quicktime, realplayer, Acrobat, shockwave, java runtime, and other plugins, if they want to look linux friendly.
My brother loved it because he now can see http://www.infiniti.com, http://www.chevy.com and http://www.toyota.com.
By the way http://www.toyota.com had a flash rendering problem in firefox 2.x while it was working fine with opera latest.
Thanks again Adobe!
I just downloaded the RPM from their site and installed it on Fedora Core 6. Installation went fine and Firefox began using it right away. Finally those few sites that would not work properly are now completely usable.
please make a f–king x86_64 version!!!
There seem to be three ways.
One is nspluginwrapper
Second is a 32 bit chroot
Third is apparently to operate a 32 bit version of firefox. I got detailed instructions on how to do this from a friend and will post if anyone wants them.
The beta version of the Flash Player 9 plugin for Linux has been out for a while already and it’s been pretty damn good sofar. Glad to see Adobe keeps the ball rolling with a new release.
I don’t think I really like Flash.
One of the reasons is that most Flash content is so poorly designed. I did like that (was it?) Orange flash ad on this site a while ago.
In any case, Flash is responsible for a billions of $/EUR/.. ad industry. Adobe would be a bit stupid not to make sure good Flash is available for all operating systems (is is THAT hard? And yes, incuding 64bit). Quite some Linux/BSD/etc. users are consumers too. Some of them might be well-educated, have good money to spend.
So..
Maybe some ad makers would not like this slow behaviour of yours, Adobe. They want their content to reach all of us.
I used earlier builds of Flash9 in Linux and I always felt it wasn’t finished. For example when my mouse cursor was over flash applet, it was stealing my pressed keys, mouse wheel didn’t work. I really hope this is fixed and it is not intention to not return keys back to browser if they’re unused… anybody noticed it?
It probably felt that way because it wasn’t finished, that’s why it is called a beta
“While Konqueror is not my preferred browser, I would hardly call it “filth”.”
ehm, you might want to reconsider what you think i was talking about. hint: it comes from adobe.
“If you’re boycotting sites that use Flash, why are you posting on this site? Or do you only mean non-advertising uses? ”
i have no problem whatsoever using osnews, and i do not have flash, so i dont see a problem? however, when a site doesent wish me as visitor, i do have a problem, fortunately i also have the solution: i ignore their crap.
“””
“While Konqueror is not my preferred browser, I would hardly call it “filth”.”
ehm, you might want to reconsider what you think i was talking about. hint: it comes from adobe.
“””
Now *that’s* a dirty rotten lie. I happen to know that Konqueror comes from the KDE project and *not* Adobe.
Actually… I was just funnin’ ya.
I hate flash as much as anyone. The advertising abuse alone makes me want to vomit.
Actually, though, it’s probably the best format for embedded media playing in Linux. I’ve always found that the available plugins for other formats have problems on mainstream sites. You click and nothing happens, or you get a blank screen, or the video doesn’t play in the right place, or whatever.
With Flash, it tends to work, albeit it with frightening processor usage.
The real problem is the ads. I (greatly) dislike having flash installed because of them. And Firefox’s facility for turning off flash in preferences never works.
Does not work without gtk2, pity.
I find flash video useful when I am looking for news but the Flash runtime is a CPU hog. I dislike the way designers can make complicated animations with transparency and lots of moving parts which tends to make my Firefox browser act sluggishly. I thought eventually this would get fixed but as a plugin for browsers Flash still can degrade your browsing experience if designers get too ambitious with it.
Edited 2007-01-18 11:17
@Dubhthach “Do you really need a 64bit web browser tbh? I think i’m happy allowing firefox stay as a 32bit app on my x86_64 installs.”
why yes i do. i shouldnt need to install lots of 32bit compatibility stuff to use plugins. and also i use konqueror, which means it relies on a binary for loading the netscape plugins, and so if i must choose once, 32bit or 64bit. which makes it impossible for me to run flash and 64bit plugins.
a hard choice? definetly not, flash will simply be ignored.
@sbergman27 “Actually, though, it’s probably the best format for embedded media playing in Linux. I’ve always found that the available plugins for other formats have problems on mainstream sites. You click and nothing happens, or you get a blank screen, or the video doesn’t play in the right place, or whatever.
With Flash, it tends to work, albeit it with frightening processor usage.”
it may be that flash works better than “mainstream sites” for videos, but that is then because those sites are doing it WRONG.
those sites just needs to get ignored, they clearly dont want people visiting.
i can perfectly easily embed videos onto sites myself, where it works perfectly with all linux media player browser plugins i’ve tried. and you know what? its not hard. people writing the “mainstream sites” just needs to get either shot, or into an occupation where they arent surrounded by an utterly smelling stink of failure.
This is great news on one end, but I am not a fan of Adobe. What exactly is gained by downloading a new major version of Flash or Reader every few months? Usually about twice as many MB, with little to show for it. I call Adobe products bloatware, and this applies to most all of their products. Reader 5 does everything I need it to, taking less than half the space of, what is it now…?, version 8. Must be adding a lot of features that I don’t use, and most people don’t use.
This is great news on one end, but I am not a fan of Adobe. What exactly is gained by downloading a new major version of Flash or Reader every few months?
Evince works fine for everything I need so I don’t have Reader installed on my system. I try to keep stuff that’s not “free as in freedom” off my system but I am pragmatic enough to install it if I need its functionality.
So I have Adobe Flash 9 installed because I need it to view content and I need 9 over 7 as firstly it cures the sound sync problem and secondly there is some content out their that has a Flash 8 minimum requirement. When Gnash can handle all that I won’t keep the Adobe Flashplayer plugin anymore.
I was trying to look at the Australian Open live scores with the new Flash player 9 and it says I need flash 8 at least to see them. I know I can display the content, but it’s not served to me.
http://www.australianopen.com/
I hate it when web designers that must have been very well paid for doing such site don’t even bother about testing it under Linux. Can’t even find a link to write them so they fix it.
It works here. It could be a version mismatch, I had a similar problem when I first installed the previous beta. You should check if about:plugins reports both Flash 7 and Flash 9; in this case, close firefox, go to ~/.mozilla/firefox/ and remove pluginreg.dat (make a backup copy of the file before), then restart firefox.
It reports “Shockwave Flash 9.0 r31”. Every other site that requires Flash 8 sees it as Fash 9. Maybe they have a different detection in this site and they’re confused by the “r31”. This is a package from Archlinux repository, I’ll try to install the original and see if that works.
Thanks.
##EDIT##
I have just tried it but it’s still the same. The original also reports itself as “Shockwave Flash 9.0 r31” and the site tells me I need Flash 8 or higher. Are you sure it works for you in Linux? Right now there are no matches, so no live scores, but if you click in the “IBM Summary Scoreboard” where it says “Launch PointTracker” it has the same effect here.
Edited 2007-01-18 15:16
I guess author of that webpage is just lame. He probably used following condition:
If Flash!=8 Then Error
So that will fail for anything than version eight.
Ok, it was a problem with the user agent. Now that it detects it correctly as Firefox it tells me I need Shockwave 10.1 player !
why go through all the hassle in that howto? can’t ubuntu use the standard debian repositories?
apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
is all you need.
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/web/flashplugin-nonfree
version 9 has been in unstable for a while now.
http://wiki.debian.org/FlashPlayer
Elation
Well, I was excited that for the first time Linux had parity(or even higher than 9.0.31 for Linux and 9.0.28 for Windows) Windows with respect to flash player.
My OS
So I downloaded the tgz file. I have PCLinuxOS .93 with all updates installed and custom Firefox 2(as FF2 is not yet available thru Synaptic). Followed the instructions.
Funny thing during extraction
On extraction and following the exact instructions, I was able to extract to
/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox2 and /usr/lib/seamonkey the libflashplayer.so file into the plugins folder. What I observed is that the old plugin was 2.7MB while the new one was 6.1MB.
But this was really funny. I tried to install to /usr/lib/opera(where my Opera installation is) and the installer repeatedly said “Directory not found”. Sheesh! Adobe, are u really that crapish..?
Copying
Not deterred, I copied the file libflashplayer.so into the plugins folder of Opera and Flock. After this it was time to Test
Final Testing
I used the below sites for testing.
http://www.youtube.com (most are flash 7 videos)
http://www.laptoplogic.com (Videos require Flash 8 or higher)
http://www.toyota.com
Guess what. I have never seen Mozilla family browsers Firefox2, SeaMonkey and Flock(.7.9.1) crash so well in many months of usage.
Incase of Youtube, I get to play a clip and then at the end of the clip is the end of my browser.
To be safe, I logged off and relogged on.
Next time I start the browser there is a option to Restore Session which I tried. Now this opened the youtube page and immediately crashed with a speed that I wish firefox starts with. No use. Same with Flock and
seamonkey.
Now going to Laptoplogic and Toyota which are designed for Flash 8 or newer, I get the crash after 5s if not immdly.
Irony of Ironies
Now in all this mess, Opera 9.02 is the only one that is currently not crashing when encountering the above websites. Considering it was not in the default installation of libflashplayer.so …
Postscript
In my limited experience with Linux (roughly 8 months) and >7yrs with Windows(98, 2K, XP) as a user(not a programmer/developer) I have never encountered anything that resembles this behaviour even with the various crappy incarnations of IE5 and IE6. Thank you Adobe for making browsing experience in Linux worse than the the worst in Windows.
I am planning to reinstall the flash player plugin 7 for the mozilla family.
Next time somebody says IE crashes while Mozilla rocks! I am going to laugh :-))
“Next time somebody says IE crashes while Mozilla rocks! I am going to laugh :-))”
you do realize that just becuase opera may not crash, while mozilla does, doesent mean its a bug or problem in mozilla? in case you did not know, then you do now.
it is obviously adobes ludacrisly bad plugin that is causing this, and its not surprising, hell, these people are putting out “we must dlopen libasound.so.2 instead of libasound.so” as a major reason of why flash 9 was so late for linux, and this was their MAIN linux dev guy that wrote this, this really gives one confidence in their abilities.
im certainly not going to run their blob on any of my systems, that i have ANY wish to keep intact.
Redeeman,
I have been using Adobe Flash windows plugin 9.0.28 for a while and it has not created any problems till now. about:plugins in FF2.0.1 in my WinXP gives
Shockwave Flash
File name: NPSWF32.dll
Shockwave Flash 9.0 r28
MIME Type Description Suffixes Enabled
application/x-shockwave-flash Adobe Flash movie swf Yes
application/futuresplash FutureSplash movie spl Yes
So it is either a mozilla issue in Linux or Adobe Flash in Linux. Whatever it is, it is important that the application is crashing. So much for Firefox/Mozilla stability.
As a user discovering Linux on Desktop and being impressed with various features vis-a-vis Windows, I am slowly discovering that applications in Linux can crash as good as we assume in Windows.
I have experienced BSODs 3 times in Windows.
First time for unknown reason in Win2K (incidentally it was after I d/w a spoof of a Mac “Switch” ad which I showed to my boss who had a PowerMac at his home)
The other 2 times it was bcos of a HD issues.
I have had not that many -ve experience with XP/2K so far that many ppl. describe here and various forums and I really wanted to beleive that Linux is uberstable. Now as I discover more and more, Linux is behavin too much like Windows
Rgds..
Uh, any browser should be able to handle misbehaving plugins, if Mozilla browsers are crashing while Opera stays running, that says to me that Opera is more robust.
Next time somebody says IE crashes while Mozilla rocks! I am going to laugh :-))
Speaking of flash, I was trying to watch a long flash video a few months ago, and Firefox 1.5 kept crashing about every ten minutes. So eventually I gave up and decided to try IE6 – bad mistake. About 30 seconds in it crashes and the windows shell gets killed. Undeterred, I restart explorer.exe and try one more time. This time, after about 10 seconds the whole OS blue-screens on me. I restart and thank mozilla for only crashing itself every 10 mins.
I hope that Adobe never release Flash to FreeBSD- then we are not forced to watch that crapload of advertising on sites. And I hope this crap will never work on FreeBSD even with Linux Compatibility Layer Bloat (LCLB) installed.
How about if they release (for those who do want it) and you simply not use it? Fair compromise?
I’m running Linux on PowerPC machine.
It’s there, it just has a dependency on QEMU.
Edited 2007-01-19 01:16
It was surprisingly quite simple to install the newly-released Flash 9 on openSUSE 10.2. Here’s how I did it.
http://alternativenayk.wordpress.com/2007/01/18/flash-9-install-rpm…
I spent the better half of a day trying to get an indesign file to output to PDF that then could be snaked so we could run the print job multiup for a run.
I had nothing but colour management issues that f-ed me off. We do not need the kitchen sink and I prefer to deal with our colour settings via our Fiery Server not through each and every bloody Adobe app.
Found out that the problem magically disappeared when I closed down every Adobe app except Acrobat 7.0 (tried 8.0 and went back to 7) and then PDF Snaked it. The artworks transparency and colour settings stuck this time and outputted properly on our Digital printer.
F-n annoying that I had to go through so much especially as it seemed to be an Adobe app conflict causing my grief not my colour profiles/settings.
Wished they’d get their crap together and simplify these things and move to consistent colour/transparency engines accross their product range in CS2. I hope CS3 is an improvement in this area or else I’m throwing in the towel. Already I find CutePDF to be easier to use and work with than Distiller.
I see flash going the same way and although my GF likes YouTube and Cute Overload.com, I am enjoying not having flash on my Ubuntu64 install.