2011/2/10

Installing browser plug-ins (Adobe Flash)

Flash plug-ins
Different plug-ins exist for viewing Flash content in browsers. Swfdec and Gnash are two open source and Free Software plug-ins which work natively on both i586 and x86_64. While they can be used to view most common Flash video animations on sites as YouTube, they can give problems on more complex Flash content. Adobe's proprietary Flash plug-in for Linux should be more complete, but it's not open source and there exists only an i586 version of this plug-in. The i586 Adobe Flash plug-in, can also be used on Mandriva x86_64 by using nspluginwrapper.

By preference, you only have one of these plug-ins at the same time installed. This way, you are sure that your preferred Flash plug-in is used, and not some other plug-in which is installed at the same time.
SWfdec
Install the swfdec-mozilla package with Mandriva's software installation tool
Gnash
Install gnash-firefox-plugin with Mandriva's software installation tool (Install & Remove Software in your applications menu). If you use Konqueror, install gnash-konqueror-plugin
Adobe Flash
Use Mandriva's software installation tool to make sure gnash-firefox-plugin and swfdec-mozilla are not installed, so they certainly cannot interfere with Adobe's Flash plug-in. If necessary, remove them from your system.

If you are using Mandriva x86_64 edition, make sure all media sources are configured, both i586 and x86_64 sources (see Making more software available).

On Mandriva x86_64, use the software installer to make sure the nspluginwrapper package is installed

Go to http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash and choose to download the Flash RPM for Linux. A window will pop-up asking whether you want to save the file on your disk or whether you want to install it with the Software Installer. Choose the latter option. The Flash plug-in and all the libraries it requires, will be installed automatically

As an alternative to the previous step, you can also install the flash-player-plugin package with Mandriva's Software Installer if you have configured the PLF i586 non-free repository

If you are using Mandriva x86_64 and Flash is still not shown in about:plugins after installing the plug-in, make sure libflashplayer.so exists in either /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins or in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins (if necessary, copy or link this file from /usr/lib/flash-plugin), open a terminal (Terminal or Konsole in the applications menu - Tools) and execute this command

nspluginwrapper -v -a -i

If you don't have sound working in Flash animations, make sure you have the packages libflashsupport and libpulseaudio0 installed.