Linux x86_64 flash silent? Here's your fix.

I’ll admit that I’ve been running nothing but Linux for years; it just makes my live doing dev and maintaining other unix based systems easier – however, when you’re in the Web 2.0 world, you’re expected to have some multimedia capabilities.

My laptop’s HD died with no warning (thankfully, I always keep a recent backup), and so I had to reinstall some tools. I generally use the bundled npwrapper which wraps the Netscape API for any shared library functions, but this time I found that it was oddly silent for Flash 10. I did an LDD on the binary, and discovered several support libraries required:

%ldd libflashplayer.so | wc -l
54

Yes, that’s 54 shared x86 (i386/32 bit) libraries required on my x86_64 install.

I went looking for the Adobe Flash 64 bit beta version, and found it here. Upon removing the 32 bit wrapper via npwrapper, and installing it into my /lib/lib64/browser-plugins directory, fixing permissions, and reloading Firefox, all works. Hope that helps the rest of you running 64 bit kernels who like to “keep multimedia up with The Joneses”.