Adobe Flash Player 10 for 64 Bit Linux – Installation

Adobe announced the alpha release of Flash Player 10 a few days ago, for 64 Bit Linux. I’ve tested if for a couple of days – looks good so far and aside from a nasty bug when visiting Gmail (see below for work around), and a few other sites, which causes Firefox to crash and close completely (Segmentation fault), it seems to be fine.

Change Log

Updated 16.02.10 – 10.0.45.2 released

Updated 10/12/09 For Adobe’s Pre Release 10.0.42.34

Updated 25/09/09 For Adobe’s Alpha Refresh 10.0.32.18

Updated 24/02/09 for Adobe’s Apha release refresh 10.0.22.87

Updated 03/01/09 for Adobe’s 16/12/08 release refresh: The Gmail bug noted below seems to be fixed! I’ll leave the information here though, just in case anyone still has problems.

Updated 05/01/09: Looks great so far – no crashes, and no more annoying npviewer.bin chewing up all my resources!

Installation is pretty simple – I had to uninstall the flashplugin-nonfree package installed from the Medibuntu repository first:

sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree nspluginwrapper


Then downloaded the Alpha 64 Bit Flash Player 10 from Adobe Labs to my Desktop. Once downloaded, it’s simply a case of closing Firefox, unpacking the tarball, and copying the file to a location Firefox will find and use it:

cd ~/Desktop
tar -zxvf libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins
cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins

That’s it. Open up Firefox, and navigate to about:plugins – you should see the new plugin somewhere in the list:

The Gmail bug can be worked around by logging into the old interface: https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1

However, if the Alpha release of the Flash 10 plugin is causing more problems than it’s solving, it can easily be uninstalled, and the 32 bit version reinstalled by running:

rm ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Personally, as much as I’d love to use the 64 bit plugin, I’m going to wait until it’s a little more stable – Beta or RC should be fine. I’m now using the latest Alpha release with no issues to report so far!

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