how to: November 2008 Archives

Adobe FINALY released a native 64bit Flash Player 10 plugin. Although this is still an alpha release, the news is very exciting for Linux users, since we don't longer depend on nspluginwrapper, which although does the job, has it's drawbacks.

I have put together a small tutorial on how to install the native flash player 10 64bit plugin for linux.

#!/bin/bash
# Script  created by
# Romeo-Adrian Cioaba romeo.cioaba@spotonearth.com

echo "Stopping any Firefox that might be running"
sudo killall -9 firefox

echo "Removing any other flash plugin previously installed:"
sudo apt-get remove -y --purge flashplugin-nonfree gnash gnash-common mozilla-plugin-gnash swfdec-mozilla libflashsupport nspluginwrapper
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -rfd /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper


echo "Installing Flash Player 10"
cd ~
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
tar zxvf libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ 

echo "Linking the libraries so Firefox and apps depending on XULRunner (vuze, liferea, rsswol) can find it."
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so  /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/

# now doing some cleaning up:
sudo rm -rf libflashplayer.so 
sudo rm -rf libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

You can now restart firefox ;-)

Some users seem to have problems with viewing this page, so i wrapped everything needed to install the native 64bit flash player on linux into a shell script. Grab the Ubuntu script here, chmod +x and execute it.

Thanks to Claudio de Taunay for providing a script that works in OpenSuSE 11. You can pick it up here.

Let me know if you encounter any bugs.

Since I use only Ubuntu for about two and half years, i was searching for a while for a good Feed aggregator. I have first tested liferea 1.4.x that comes in the repos but i wasn't really satisfied with the speed. Then I looked into using Straw and Blam!< but i didn't like the interface for neither of them. I settled for a while with the eclise based feedreader RSSOwl, which is a great tool, but unfortunatelly when i switched to 64bit i had to ditch it since it was way too heavy on the CPU (not sure if it was due to Java on 64bit or the fact that i used a dev release of RSSOwl).

I decided to give Liferea 1.5.x a try (although it's a development release) and i have setup a step by step tutorial on how to install Liferea 1.5.5 on Ubuntu. I wanted to test it's webkit backend so I had to install some dev libraries first.

Step 1: Install dependencies:
sudo apt-get install intltool libwebkit-dev libgconf2-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libsqlite3-dev libglade2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libnotify-dev libnm-glib-dev liblualib50-dev libavahi-ui-dev

Step 2: Download Liferea 1.5.x source from sourceforge:
wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/liferea/liferea-1.5.5.tar.gz

Step 3: Extract it:
tar zxvf liferea-1.5.5.tar.gz

Step 4: Configure and compile:
cd liferea-1.5.5
./configure --prefix=/usr
You should get an output similar to the following:
make
sudo make install

Step 5: You're done. You can start liferea by going to Applications -> Internet -> Liferea Feed Reader or from terminal by "liferea"

I am realy happy with the speed Liferea is rendering pages via webkit and with the fact that i can have a huge cache (if i want to :P)