Install Flash Player 9 (beta2) in Ubuntu Linux

I remembered that I read a news item a couple of weeks ago about Adobe issuing a beta version of their Flash Plugin for Linux and I decided to give it a go. The main reason was that I could not view my Google Analytics stats and graphs otherwise.

To download the Linux Flash plugin head to http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html and download the archive (to your desktop, home folder, doesn’t matter). Unzip it, either with the default archive manager (File Roller), or by issuing the following command in a terminal after cd`ing to the folder where you downloaded the plugin:

tar -zxvf FP9_plugin_beta_112006.tar.gz

Replace “FP9_plugin_beta_112006.tar.gz” with the appropriate filename.

You can install the plugin as root or just for yourself. To install as root copy libflashplayer.so to the main Firefox plugin directory:

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

To install just for your own user copy the plugin file to your ~/.mozilla/plugins/ directory:

cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/

If you used Automatix to install a Flash Player plugin you can safely overwrite that file.

You should not have any instances of Firefox open during these operations. To remove the plugin simply erase the libflashplayer.so file:

sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so

if you installed it as root, or

sudo rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

if you installed it in your home directory.

Ow, Flash sucks.