Adobe just made public the 11.2 beta Flash Player for Linux. Its most important new feature over the stable release is the multithreaded video decoding. This article describes how to install it on openSUSE 11.4 and 12.1. Before starting, I’ll list a few options and you pick the one that suits you:
- you have a 64 bit computer and want the latest Flash Player with multithreading and you don’t mind if some stuff doesn’t work at times. Read on, this is for you
- you have a 64 bit computer and want the stable Flash Player version 11 instead of the 32 bit version 10 that came with openSUSE 11.4. You should read this, because the method that describes how to install the beta player is the same for the released version
- you have a 64 bit computer with openSUSE 12.1. It already has the 64 bit Flash plugin stable version 11.1, but if you want multithreading too, read on. If you have just installed the OS a minute ago from a Live image and need Flash right away, just search for flash-player in YaST Software Management. The explanation is that openSUSE will pull automatically the plugin from the Non-OSS repository, only a bit later
- you have a 32 bit computer. You should be fine with the default package from openSUSE. The multithreading won’t improve anything for you because there aren’t any multicore 32 bit x86 processors
Also, there’s something you might like to try: the YouTube HTML5 trial here. This does not use Flash for video.
First, remove the existing Flash packages
You have to get rid of the default flash-player package and make sure it’s not reinstalled again. Start YaST Software Manager, search for “flash-player”. It will find two items:
- flash-player
- pullin-flash-player
Right-click on each of them and choose “Delete”. Then click “Accept”.
Verify that the packages are gone by running this command in Terminal (Konsole):
rpm --query --all | grep flash-player
It should not return any output, just give the shell prompt back to you.
If you have openSUSE 11.4, you should also verify that there’s no leftover plugin wrapper file:
nspluginwrapper --list
There should not be any line containing this /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so. If there is, you have to remove it this way (as root):
su - nspluginwrapper --remove /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so
Start YaST Software Manager again, search for “flash-player”, right-click on each of the two packages and this time choose “Taboo — Never Install”. Click “Accept”.
Download the 64 bit 11.2 beta Flash Plugin from Adobe Labs
Look around this page for the link (it changes from version to version): http://labs.adobe.com
Choose Download plug-in for Linux 64-bit (TAR.GZ 6.7 MB). Save it in “Downloads” in your home directory. Decompress it there. It contains “libflashplayer.so” — this is the actual plugin and a directory “usr” that contains some files for the Flash settings KDE4 control module, also a generic module that works in Gnome and a readme.txt file.
Move files to their proper directories
Open a Terminal (Konsole), go to “Downloads” in you home directory, where you have decompressed the archive and become root.
cd ~/Downloads su
Move files:
- the actual Flash Player plugin
mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/browser-plugins
- the Flash settings KDE4 control module, icons and .desktop files associated with it and the generic module that works in Gnome
cp --verbose --recursive usr/* /usr rm --recursive --force usr readme.txt
Verify that it’s working
- open Firefox and type “about:plugins” in the Location bar. It should list Flash version 11.2
- open KDE4 Configure Desktop. There should be a new section “Lost and Found” containing the module “Adobe Flash Player”. Clicking on it should display Flash configuration settings. Or, if you don’t use KDE4, open a terminal window and run this:
/usr/bin/flash-player-properties
One last useful tip: https://silviumc.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/how-to-stop-the-screen-saver-in-kde-while-watching-long-flash-clips-in-a-web-browser/
silviumc 