Installing The Adobe Flash Plugin 10 On Ubuntu 8.04 (i386)

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme

This tutorial shows how you can install the Adobe Flash plugin 10 on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. Although this sounds quite trivial, there are a few problems along the way, especially if Flash 9 is already installed.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Update The System

When I first tried to install Flash 10 on a not up-to-date system, Firefox did not recognize the Flash 10 plugin, although no Flash 9 was installed. I found out that you have to update the system first. Go to System > Administration > Update Manager...

... and click on the Check button to check for available updates:

Type in your password:

If there are updates available, click on Install Updates to install them:

It is possible that the system needs a restart after the update. If you see the blue restart icon in the taskbar, reboot the system:

 

2 Install Flash 10

Now that the system is up-to-date, visit http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&promoid=BUIGP and select .deb for Ubuntu 8.04+ in the drop-down menu:

Then click on the Agree and install now button:

The Open with GDebi Package Installer (default) option does not seem to work if Flash 9 is currently installed (i.e., Flash 10 installs fine, but Firefox still recognizes it as Flash 9.0 r124, no matter if you restart Firefox, log out and in again, reboot the system, or even remove Flash 9 before installing Flash 10). I found that this problem does not occur if you install Flash 10 from the command line. Therefore we store the Flash 10 .deb package on our hard drive (e.g. on the desktop) by selecting Save File:

After the download has finished, open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal):

First, we remove the Flash 9 plugin (you can skip this step if you are absolutely sure that Flash 9 is not installed):

sudo apt-get remove --purge flashplugin-nonfree

Then go to the directory where you've stored the Flash 10 .deb package (e.g. /home/falko/Desktop)...

cd /home/falko/Desktop

... and install Flash 10 as follows:

sudo dpkg -i install_flash_player_10_linux.deb

Now restart Firefox and type

about:plugins

into the address bar. Firefox will then show you a list of all installed plugins, and you should see Flash 10 among them:

 

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