Musings on the State of the Art

Note : This post will become obsolete as soon as Flash re-releases its 64 bit Flash application. They did have an Alpha release in the wild, but personal testing led me to believe it was buggy and extremely prone to crashing my browsers (especially Chrome). They apparently felt the same way and have shut it down for now, with the promise of better, stronger, faster, coming soon.

Update : I got an email asking which version of Ubuntu this was. My apologies for not adding that in – 10.04 – Lucid Lynx released in April 2010. Its the LTS version so will retain support till 2013.

Anyways, there’s lots of tutorials out there in the wild, that instruct you to use ia32-libs, and nswrapperplugin via the nswrapper plugin -i method (see end of this post for that method if you need). However there is an easier way.

Anyways, assuming this is a fairly new build. Here’s what you do.
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Restart all your browsers and voila – all is good in the world again. This will automatically install the following packages as well.

flashplugin-installer flashplugin-nonfree ia32-libs nspluginwrapper

If you already have a previous version of ia32-libs installed, this may or may not work for you. In that case, you may be tempted to purge your current ia32-libs, however, be careful when you are doing this, I strongly suggest you only do this on ‘new builds’ that don’t already have a ton of 32 bit programs running that are relying on this. For instance, Skype. If you have already installed Skype on your 64 bit machine, do not remove ia32-libs. Scroll down and try the more manual method.

The more manual method is described in detail in the following blog post : My Science is Better…

For those of you that don’t want to follow the link – its fairly straight forward.

i) Remove all older versions of Flash Plugins
sudo apt-get remove -y --purge flashplugin-nonfree gnash gnash-common mozilla-plugin-gnash swfdec-mozilla libflashsupport nspluginwrapper

ii) Then remove any Flash Libraries
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -rfd /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper

iii) If you haven’t already download ia32-libs and nswrapperplugin
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs nspluginwrapper

iv) Get the latest version of Flash from Adobe : http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

v) Untar it.

vi) Place libflashplayer.so (or whatever the filename is then) in a folder that you can access. Preferably put it in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. Both Firefox and Chrome look in this folder for plugins. Then run the following

vii) Nswrapper time…
sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/

Note, that in some cases, this won’t work – and you will get the dreaded error ::
nspluginwrapper: no appropriate viewer found for libflashplayer.so

If that happens to you, try the first approach, and see if that works.

Update [April 2011]
Flash released a 64 bit version in Adobe Labs. Install that if you like. Thus far it seems stable, and not too much of a memory hog.