My Science Is Better

Install Adobe Flash Player 10 on Ubuntu 64bit

UPDATE: Native Adobe 64bit Flash Player has been released.
I have put together a small tutorial on how to install the native flash player 10 64bit plugin for linux.

Adobe recently launched Flash Player 10 Beta codenamed "Astro". Great news, as it supports a bunch of new features, but as usually nothing yet for the 64 bit users. I'm going to show you how to get flash player 10 running on Ubuntu 64bit using nspluginwrapper. Before doing anything in the terminal make sure you close Firefox else you might not get the expected result.

1. Make sure you don't have any other flash plugin installed on your system:
sudo apt-get remove -y --purge flashplugin-nonfree gnash gnash-common mozilla-plugin-gnash swfdec-mozilla libflashsupport nspluginwrapper

1.1 To be sure we don't have any other old flash libs let's cleanup the folders where it usually resides:
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/*flash*
sudo rm -rfd /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper

2. Install ia32-libs and latest nspluginwrapper
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs nspluginwrapper

3. Download the latest flash player from Adobe Labs and extract it:
cd ~
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_051508.tar.gz
tar zxvf flashplayer10_install_linux_051508.tar.gz
sudo cp install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
rm -rf ~/install_flash_player_10_linux/

4. Use nspluginwrapper to install the plugin and link it to firefox
sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/

EDIT: here is how to install flash player 10 on 64bit systems for Liferea and Vuze

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/

5. Start Firefox and type in the address bar about:plugins and press enter. You should get a result similar to this one:

6. Go to http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/index.html and test the new features.

EDIT: if you are lazy by nature, you can just grab install_flash_player_10_ubuntu64bit, a small script i put together. Make it executable (chmox +x install_flash_player_10_ubuntu64bit) and run it in terminal. It will kill ask you for root password the kill any Firefox you might have running and install the flash player 10

NOTE: for the new and improved script follow this URL: http://meandubuntu.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/flash-10-rc-on-ubuntu-amd64/