Linux Section

Flash Player 9

Adobe has put out Flash Player 9 for Linux and Mac OS X. I received that news with some mixed emotion: do I care? Well, sure it's important that Mac and Linux get some Adobe love, but I can't think of a single site I need to visit where I'd be forced into Flash to view it. People do use Flash, yes, but nobody is dumb enough to use ONLY Flash. Well, maybe not quite nobody, but nobody I need to visit.

But heck, might as well go get it, right? Can't hurt.. or can't hurt too much. So off to Adobe land to get Flashed.

The Mac Version was easy to find and easy to install. The download link at http://www.adobe.com/products/ took me right to it and the install was a zip that unpacked to a .dmg that had the installer. Couple o' clicks and done. Piece of cake.

Not so for Linux, of course. The download link from the products page gives you Flash Player 7 (or at least did so as I write this). Nope, if you want 9, you need to go to labs.adobe.com. And then, because it's Linux, and there's no reason for standards, you have to figure out where your distro wants browser plugins installed. For the Suse 10 I used, that was /usr/lib/browser-plugins. To find yours, try "ls /usr/lib/*/*plug*".

In either case, you want to quit all browsers before installing. After installing, you can test Flash by visiting http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/.

If that works, you are Flashified. Whatever that's worth to you, I'm glad Adobe is doing this. Read what one of the Adobe engineers has to say about this "hell freezing over" event.

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