Tag Archives: firefox

Install Flash Player for Mozilla Firefox Manually on Debian 7

Adobe_Flash_Player_v11_iconI have a general disdain for Flash-based applications. But unfortunately, certain sites like Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance seem to like Flash for chart presentation.

I had previously installed the GNU Gnash Plugin. I’d much rather use GNU software than something from Adobe. But recently, my Gnash Plugin for Firefox had been misbehaving. (Perhaps because of an outdated version?) So I decided to upgrade– and give in to Adobe– and the steps for installation are pretty simple. I captured them here.

  1. First, download the software from Adobe. You’ll see a selection box asking you what version to download (RPM, YUM, etc), and you should choose the generic “.tar.gz for other Linux” bundle. Save that to a convenient place, e.g. /tmp/flash/install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz (I’ll assume that location going forward)
  2. From the command line, extract the contents of your download:

    cd /tmp/flash
    tar -xvf install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz
    

    Among the resulting files will be libflashplayer.so. That’s the one Firefox cares about (I think the other files are related to the stand-alone Flash Player.)

  3. Copy libflashplayer.so to the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory:
    sudo cp /tmp/flash/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
    

    It’s assumed that your system will already have that directory, but there’s a chance you’ll need to create it. Depending on which distro of Linux you’re running, there are several directories that Firefox might check for plugins. When in doubt, trust Mozilla’s documentation of this.

  4. Finally verify that your Flash plugin is both present and activated. Restart Firefox, and on the menu bar, click “Tools > Add-ons…” and view the Plugins listing. You should see “Shockwave Flash” in the listing. Make sure it’s activated.

From there, enjoy playing some videos or charting some stocks!

Fix Firefox Empty Printer List on Debian Squeeze 64-bit

Firefox icon

I recently installed Debian Squeeze (6.0.3) 64-bit, running XFCE.  While using Firefox 9 (and 10), I found that my CUPS printers weren’t showing up in Firefox’s print dialog box.  All I wanted to do was print to PDF! And a nearly identical configuration on my 32-bit Debian Squeeze setup was working just fine.

Running Firefox from the bash command line pointed me in the right direction by generating “ELFCLASS64” errors like the following:

Gtk-Message: Failed to load module “canberra-gtk-module”: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(firefox:13517): Gtk-WARNING **: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/engines/libxfce.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
(firefox:13517): Gtk-WARNING **: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/engines/libxfce.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
/usr/lib/gio/modules/libgvfsdbus.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64
Failed to load module: /usr/lib/gio/modules/libgvfsdbus.so
LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/gnash/libgnashplugin.so [/usr/lib/gnash/libgnashplugin.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64]

Thanks to some reading, and thanks to Oleg Cherkasov’s comment #22 here, I was able to get it working.  Specifically, the following export just prior to launching Firefox seems to do the trick:

export GTK_PATH=/usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/

I presume this overrides the default GTK settings by pointing instead to the lib32 GTK. Works for me!

(Mind you, IceWeasel 3.5.x was able to find the printers on its own without this fix.)

I chose not to add this export to my user profile because I wasn’t sure what the broader impacts of the GTK override might be. So nowadays I just launch Firefox from a shell script that does this export immediately prior to kicking off the Firefox executable.