Adding the Flash Player Plugin

by scott_glaser — last modified Aug 21, 2008 08:00 AM

Contributors: daMaestro

— filed under: Multimedia Solutions, Desktop

Macromedia Flash Player is the high performance, light-weight, highly expressive client runtime that delivers powerful and consistent user experiences across major operating systems, browsers, mobile phones and devices. Installed on over 500 million internet-connected desktops and mobile devices, Flash Player is the backbone of the Flash Platform and enables organizations and individuals to build and deliver great digital experiences to their end users.

Requirements

This assumes you have a working Fedora installation. This also assumes you can actually utilize Flash, currently the Flash Plugin only supports i386 installations. With Fedora 8+ it is also able to be used with x86_64 (running in 32bit mode.)

Doing the work

Installing Flash

The Flash plugin is not included by default, to use Flash you first have to Install it:

Open a terminal
Now we need to install the Adobe repository for flash. If this command fails, feel free to go to the adobe website and look for the rpm that installs the yum repository. Run:
```
su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'
```
Provide the root password when prompted

Install the flash plugin using yum:

su -c 'yum install flash-plugin libflashsupport'

Provide the root password when prompted
Once that is done the installation of the Flash Player Plugin is complete.

x86_64 Support

To be able to use the 32bit plugin with x86_64 firefox, you must install the nspluginwrapper.i386 package to enable the 32-bit Adobe Flash plugin in x86_64 Firefox and the pulseaudio-libs.i386 and libflashsupport.i386 packages to enable sound from the plugin.

Install flash-plugin as shown above.
Install the nspluginwrapper.i386, nspluginwrapper.x86_64, pulseaudio-libs.i386, and libflashsupport.i386 packages:
```
su -c "yum -y install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-libs.i386 libflashsupport.i386"
```
Run mozilla-plugin-config to register the flash plugin. (NOTE: This step is not always necessary.)
```
su -c 'mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v'
```

How to test

Close all instances of Firefox.
Open 'about:plugins' and check if the plugin is loaded.
Open Firefox and proceed to http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/welcome/, on that page you should see advertisement for flash that states Installation Complete in the Macromedia Flash Player section. If you do your Flash Player is Installed properly.

Troubleshooting Information

Most text is failing to display on Flash sites!
The plugin had bugs where it makes bad assumptions about the font configuration. For this reason, it fails to find fonts on newer versions of X.org. If you are seeing this issue, here is the link to the fix:
http://macromedia.mplug.org/faq.html#font

Read Red Hat Bugzilla #184028 for more information about this problem.

More Information

Disclaimer

We test this stuff on our own machines, really we do. But you may run into problems, if you do, come to #fedora on irc.freenode.net.

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