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Revision as of 22:21, 21 November 2008 by Kiilerix (talk | contribs) (Restructure a bit and mention libflashsupport deprecation)

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 Player 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 When Adobe releases a newer version of the Linux Flash plugin, it makes packages available for Fedora, but Fedora cannot include Adobe's plugin as long as it is unavailable as free and open source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 Player 10. In general, the YUM version is preferred, since it allows the player to be updated automatically through Fedora's normal update mechanism. The YUM version simply installs the repository configuration files, after which you must install Flash Player.

To begin, refer to the Adobe site at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. Select YUM for Linux to download, and confirm. After installing the repository configuration, run the following command:

su -c 'yum install flash-plugin'

i386 dependencies

Alsa must be installed to get sound from the Flash plugin:

su -c 'yum install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio'

You may see a message indicating that alsa-plugins-pulseaudio is already installed. This is not a problem.

Note that nspluginwrapper probably already is installed and will wrap the Flash plugin.

X86_64 dependencies

These instructions cover installation of the 32-bit player on a 64-bit (x86_64) platform. (At the time of this release, Adobe also has an alpha version of a 64-bit player.)

nspluginwrapper must be installed to wrap the 32-bit plugin as if it was a 64-bit plugin in the 64-bit Firefox.

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

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

Restarting Firefox

After the installation, exit all copies of Firefox and start it again to enable the plugin.

Checking the plugin

Type the following text in the Firefox address bar:

about:plugins

A section similar to the following should appear:

Flash-check-2.png

This information tells you that Adobe Flash Player 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?

libflashsupport is no longer needed with Flash 10 and has been removed from Fedora 10.

The Flash plugin now calls alsa directly, and in the default configuration alsa will hand it over to pulseaudio.