Saturday, August 28, 2010

Flash Player updates, fail

Links Flashplayer

In Zenwalk (mini-Slack), I run Iceweasel for a browser. This is just a stripped Firefox that doesn't use copyrighted code, a nice touch. However, it means the User Agent string is typically unrecognized at mainstream sites like Hulu. When there is, for example, a periodic Flash update that sites like Hulu want us to install, Adobe provides a warning message that I have an unrecognized or unsupported system.

In spite of the ominous warning message, Adobe provides the latest libflashplayer.so module at their their site. Wipe out the old directory and the two softlinks. Put in the latest libflashplayer.so and create two softlinks to the new module. Right as rain.

download the module
Go to the Adobe Flashplayer page, which has a sniffer to determine the OS is Linux. I took the basic tar.gz version which is pre-compiled (can we say "proprietary"?). Unpack it. That's it. However, there are times when Flash updates have entirely broken my browser and this then requires an OS update. We never want to update an OS for any reason. We want a stable, 30 year installation.



remove the old stuff...
To be reasonably sure older versions didn't linger and cause conflicts:

# rm -rf /usr/lib/flashplugin*
# rm /home/foo/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
# rm /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
# rm /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

...and in with the new stuff
The softlink commands are wrapping here in the blog's narrow column; there are just two of them.

# mkdir /usr/lib/flashplugin
# cp /home/foo/downloads/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin/
# ln -s /usr/lib/flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
# ln -s /usr/lib/flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so

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