Flash - the technology which allows one to build rich multimedia intensive, user interactive websites and applications was developed by the erstwile Macromedia - now acquired by Adobe. Flash is famed for its flexibility and ease of use in creating multimedia intensive web applications while keeping the size of the resulting application nominal. Lets face it. There is no way we can boycott Flash based websites effectively without missing atleast some of the vivacity of the web. Till recently, GNU/Linux users were forced to put up with support for Flash player ver 7.0. This when many websites and applications that were developed using Flash requiring Flash player 8.0 for optimal viewing. The end result being we Linux users being shut out from viewing these sites.
Now things have changed though because Adobe has (partly) delivered on its promise of supporting Linux by releasing the latest version of Flash player (ver 9.0) for Linux along side that for Windows and Mac OSX platform. The version that is released is still in the beta stage. Neverthless, this is a step in the right direction atleast for Adobe and the multimedia loving Linux users as for the former, it is a good PR exercise and for the latter, it is better access to flash based websites.
The flash support for Firefox and other web browsers on Linux hinges on just one file which goes by the name "libflashplayer.so". Installing the new flash player ver 9.0 is a simple affair and involves downloading the archive (tar.gz) from the Adobe labs website and extracting the libflashplayer.so file. Then moving the file into the plugins folder of the particular web browser.
You can do it in two ways. One is installing it globally by copying the file into the directory /usr/lib/firefox-1.x.x.x/plugins/ which requires root access. Or choosing to install locally by copying the file into the .mozilla/plugins folder in ones home directory (assuming it is for Firefox). Either way, it is mandatory to restart Firefox to make the changes take effect. One note though, if you choose to install it globally and you already have Flash player ver 7.0 plugin installed locally, then Firefox will use the ver 7.0 player as all local per user settings take precedence over the global settings in Linux.
Even though the player has been released as beta, I found it to work without a hitch and display all those sites which I missed out previously because of lack of the right version of Flash player.
Update (25th Oct 2006): As of now there is no 64 bit version of Adobe's flash player for Linux. But it is possible to run the 32-bit version in a 64-bit machine as this post on Adobe's blog indicates.
Update (25th Oct 2006): As of now there is no 64 bit version of Adobe's flash player for Linux. But it is possible to run the 32-bit version in a 64-bit machine as this post on Adobe's blog indicates.
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