2010-06-04

Installing Flash 10.1 on Ubuntu Lucid for Firefox and Chrome

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is still in beta, but it's the way to avoid the all new 0day security vulnerability in Flash Player 10.0.45.2. Here's how to install it on Ubuntu Lucid so that it works for both Firefox and Chrome.  Yes, Chrome recently started to bundle Flash Player within itself, but only for 32bit versions, so if you have 64bit Chrome for Linux you'll need the following too.
  1. Grab the Linux version of Flash 10.1 beta. After unzip and untar, you should have a libflashplayer.so
  2. Go to Synaptic Package Manager and install flashplugin-nonfree, which will set up all the directories for you
  3. Do the following to backup the old 10.0.45.2 version:
    • cd /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/
    • sudo mv libflashplayer.so libflashplayer.so.old
    • sudo mv path/to/new/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/ (replacing "path/to/new/" obviously)
  4. You might want to sudo chown root:root libflashplayer.so as well
  5. To verify, just re-open your web browser and go to the Flash Player about page.  Look in the small "Version Information" box about center on that page to check
And that's it!  Now Chrome and Firefox will both get access to the newest Flash Player that's free of the pesky 0day security bug (or so Adobe says...their security track record is...disturbing).

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