Flash Player is, in most forms, a web browser plugin used primarily to play videos, games, advertisements and particularly gaudy websites. It is owned by Adobe, and is proprietary software.
Because of some parts of it's nature (it can be unstable, it is updated frequently, and these updates often are to fix security holes), it is not included in a default installation of Slackware. A SlackBuild exists to install it, and there are packages available on AlienBOB's FTP server. Both of these solutions are for Mozilla browsers only (Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey).
Google Chrome comes integrated with an up-to-date version automagically. If you prefer Chromium as your browser, you can download the chromium-pepperflash-plugin package which contains the Flash library as extracted from the official Google Chrome binaries. This plugin package will work out of the box with AlienBOB's own chromium package.
If you are using Opera, you will have to download and install it manually.
Getting Flash Player on your computer is mostly just putting a file in the right directory, but it is different for every browser.
If you plan on using only the browsers bundled with Slackware, the SlackBuilds mentioned above are by far the simplest to install and maintain, thus they are recommended.
If you would like to maintain it yourself, or you use Opera, you will need to:
This will give you something like this:
darkstar:$ ls install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz libflashplayer.so readme.txt usr
With adjustments to names depending on your architecture, of course. In any case, the file libflashplayer.so
is the important bit. You will want to move that file into the correct directory for your browser.
For Mozilla browsers:
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
$HOME/.mozilla/plugins
For Opera:
/usr/lib/opera/plugins
$HOME/.local/lib/opera/plugins
Please note that Opera has no standard system-wide install point - the system-wide install path for libflashplayer.so
is wherever Opera is installed, in a directory named plugins
.
Either browser should then pick it up and start using it automatically. Don't be afraid to create the plugins
folder in either case if it does not already exist. To uninstall, simply delete libflashplayer.so
.
You may have noticed that, after unpacking the Flash Player, there are quite a few files aside from libflashplayer.so
, each of which you may or may not want to install.
First off is readme.txt
, which contains a few pearls of wisdom and is worth a quick read.
Aside from that is a directory called usr
, which contains some .desktop files, icons and a program for configuring Flash Player. It is worth installing, and primarily exists for KDE integration. Simply doing this:
darkstar:$ su Password: darkstar:# ls install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz libflashplayer.so readme.txt usr darkstar:# cp -r usr/* /usr
However, it is completely optional, as the defaults for Flash Player are fine.