[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

Flash Player

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.

Installation

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.

Mozilla browsers and Opera

If you would like to maintain it yourself, or you use Opera, you will need to:

  1. Go to Flash's download page.
  2. Click on the link “Different operating system or browser?”
  3. Under the box labeled “Select an operating system”, pick either “Linux (64-bit)” or “Linux (32-bit)”, depending on your architecture.
  4. Under the box labeled “Select version to download…” select “Flash Player xx.x for other linux .tar.gz (xx-bit)”, then hit Download.
  5. Unpack the newly downloaded .tar.gz file.

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:

  • System-wide location is in the directory: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
  • Per-user location is in the directory: $HOME/.mozilla/plugins

For Opera:

  • System-wide location is in the directory: /usr/lib/opera/plugins
  • Per-user location is in the directory: $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.

Additional Goodies

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.

Sources

 slackware:flashplugin ()