Getting Flash 10 To Cooperate in Fedora 9

Flash 10 is out, and all Linux users should make sure their pharmacist has his pager turned on.

It seems the new flash has some new resource needs, but doesn't actually come with them. You can go get them yourself. But when you first install it, you may find the Flash will not work in Firefox, or that you can't install Flash, or you can't configure Flash, or that Flash causes Firefox to crash or that there is no sound when you watch youtube videos or other Flash videos.

This article will be specific to Flash, Fedora 9, and Firefox 3.0.2. This also is for a 64-bit Fedora install, since the new Flash will not work on 64 bit Fedora without a helper program.

To install flash and use it with Firefox in Fedora 9, you need to do the following things:

1. Install the Adobe repository. The easiest way to do this is to go to a site that uses Flash. When you see the box telling you Flash is not installed, click "install missing plugin" or "get flash". This will take you to the Adobe download site.

Select Linux, select your distro, as as your dowload type, select "YUM for Linux". Yes, you want to open it with Package installer. Now you have the Adobe repo configured.

Next, open a terminal. Applications -> System Tools -> Terminal (if you don't have a panel or desktop launcher for terminal, make one now!)

Login as root. Make sure Firefox is closed. Then:

yum install flash-plugin

yum install nspluginwrapper

yum install alsa-oss-lib.i386

yum install libflashsupport

You need all of these things. The flash plugin will not work in 64 bit Fedora without nspluginwrapper. Installing the alsa program will resolve the issue of Firefox hanging, going gray, or not playing sound. At least it did on my computer.

To make sure the plugin is installed, restart Firefox. In the URL box, type "about:plugins". Flash should be at the top of the last, followed by nspluginwrapper.

One thing that worked when I had an issue with this was to verify the installations in terminal by using "yum install" whatever was missing. If it was installed, YUM would say so, and if it wasn't - or wasn't installed properly - YUM would install it.

Make sure Firefox is closed when installing plugins, or they may not take and the only way to fix it is uninstall the plugin, close Firefox, and start over.