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Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

Since I'm running Ubuntu, I decided to try the 'download for Ubuntu' option on the download form. It went down like this:

- Firefox asked me whether I wanted to launch the 'apturl' tool. I accepted its suggestion.

- I got a dialog saying "This will enable the Canonical Partners repository". I'm pretty sure I already had it enabled, but sure, what the hell.

- I got the usual 'downloading updated package lists' dialog.

- I got an error dialog complaining that 'adobe-flashplugin' is a purely virtual package.

And that was that.

Guess it's back to trusty ol' tarballs.

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At least in debian:

    sudo update-flashplugin-nonfree --install

works flawlessly.

I think his point was that he followed the instructions, and they failed. If he had been using Windows, he'd have followed the instructions and succeeded. This is the problem with Linux.

FWIW, I currently run Ubuntu on my laptop, and very much like it, Windows 7 on my work desktop, and my previous laptop ran OSX.

On fedora:

- Go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

- Select Linux

- Select YUM

- Install the RPM it gives me

- `yum install flash-player`

Flawless.

    yum install flash-plugin

Yup, that's correct. Disregard me.

I also went through this, gave up, then downloaded the tarball, and copied the plugin to its spot in /var/lib/.

I did backup the old plugin though, just in case.

I also tried just updating Chrome, which is supposed to have the newer flash version, but it didn't have it. Not sure why..

Is this the first time you've circumvented the package management system? If you have done it before, maybe that's the cause of the pain now? Just guessing, since these things usually work without any complaint for me.

It would be funny --- if it wasn't so tragic --- how much easier to use and manage free software is. Especially considering it's almost all just './configure ; make && make install' at the base level.

I friggin' love pacman.

That's a good point. If Flash was free software, there wouldn't be a need for a download page - it would be in the repositories already.

I worked for Adobe and there are more than 100 licensed libraries and even more patents used in Flash. There's almost no chance it'll be open source.

And it would have been integrated in browsers directly, and we could have run valgrind on it and fixed all the bugs.

use the flash-aid plugin for firefox, it works like a charm

Not that you are one, but it's funny to watch Linux fanboys run into trouble with tasks that should be simple. It of course doesn't diminish their opinion of Linux being the greatest desktop by far.

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