Flash

This page contains information on Flash, a proprietary format for delivering audio and video content, primarily over the Internet.

Flash is Non-Free Software

Adobe's Flash plugin cannot be included in Fedora because it is not free/libre and open source software. Adobe does release a version of the Flash plugin for Linux, and this can be used in Firefox, Konqueror and other popular Internet browsers. When Adobe releases a newer version of the Linux Flash plugin, it makes packages available for Fedora, but Fedora cannot include Adobe's plugin as long as it is unavailable as free and open source software.

Fedora 10

This section contains information relevant specifically to Fedora 10 installation of Flash.

Enabling Flash Plugin

Adobe offers several methods to install their 32-bit Flash 10 plugin. In general, the YUM version is preferred, since it allows the plugin to be updated automatically through Fedora's normal update mechanism. The YUM version simply installs the repository configuration files, after which you must install the Flash plugin separately.

To begin, refer to the Adobe site at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. Select YUM for Linux to download, and confirm.

Then proceed to either the instructions for 32-bit (i386) platforms or 64-bit (x86_64) platforms.

For i386

After installing the repository configuration, run the following command to install the Flash plugin and ensure sound is enabled:

su -c 'yum install flash-plugin alsa-plugins-pulseaudio \
    libcurl'

You may see messages indicating that alsa-plugins-pulseaudio and libcurl are already installed. This is not a problem. Note also that nspluginwrapper is already installed by default and will wrap the Flash plugin.

Next, you should check the plugin.

For x86_64

Adobe Flash 64-bit alpha
At the time of this release, Adobe also has an alpha version of a 64-bit plugin. When that product is more mature, these instructions will cover its use more fully. In the meantime, the short version is to download the tarball and extract libflashplayer.so to either just your user's ~/.mozilla/plugins/ or to the system-wide /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

After installing the repository configuration, run the following command to install the Flash plugin and ensure sound is enabled:

su -c 'yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.x86_64 \
    nspluginwrapper.i386 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i386 \
    libcurl.i386'

You may see a message indicating that nspluginwrapper.x86_64 is already installed. This is not a problem.

Checking the plugin

After the installation, exit all copies of Firefox and start it again to enable the plugin. Then type the following text in the Firefox address bar:

about:plugins

A section similar to the following should appear:

This information tells you that the Adobe Flash plugin has been successfully installed.

SELinux problems

In some cases, nspluginwrapper produces SELinux AVC errors, some of which may prevent viewing Flash content. Changing the relevant SELinux boolean may resolve this problem, but eliminates a great deal of additional security when using nspluginwrapper. To make the change, run the following command:

su -c 'setsebool -P allow_unconfined_nsplugin_transition=0'

libflashsupport deprecated

The libflashsupport package is no longer needed with Flash 10 and has been removed from Fedora 10. The Flash plugin now calls the appropriate ALSA functions directly, and in the default configuration ALSA delivers sound to PulseAudio.