How-to Install Adobe Flash Player 11 Beta

Release candidate 1 of Flash 11 is available from Adobe. As well as 3D graphics support, users of 64-bit systems will be pleased that Flash 11 will be 64-bit native. This means that the old workaround for running Flash in 64-bit browsers will no long be needed.

[update: Flash 11 has been released, and the final version is now available from the Ubuntu repositories.]

Here’s how to install Flash 11 in recent versions of 64 or 32-bit Ubuntu:

1. If you’ve already installed Flash, you’ll need to remove it first. If you installed it from the Ubuntu repository, make sure the packages flashplugin-installer and flashplayer-downloader are removed.

   sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-installer flashplayer-downloader
   

2. Go to Adobe’s download page for Flash 11 and select either the 32 or 64-bit tar.gz archive download for Linux.

3. Extract the libflashplayer.so file from the downloaded archive.

4. Open the file browser and navigate to .mozilla in your home directory. Since this is a hidden folder, you’ll need to press Ctrl+L and type the path in, or enable the Show Hidden Files option in the View menu in order to get to it.

5. Create a folder called plugins if it doesn’t already exist, and move the libflashplayer.so file into it.

6. Restart your browser.

Firefox or Chromium (which will load plugins from the same directory as Firefox) should now have Flash 11 installed.

You can also use an unofficial PPA with Flash 11 packages (make sure you trust a PPA’s owner before adding it).

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