Centos 6/RHEL install Firefox22 & Adobe Flash Mozilla Plugin 32/64 bit

This tutorial is to manually install the Adobe Flash plugin for Mozilla Firefox on 32/64 bit on Centos 6/RHEL Desktop and similar rpm based distros. For older hardware see bottom of page

I find that the best way to install the Adobe Flash browser plugin is manually using the tar.gz file, as opposed to the various .rpms, yums and such like which are available which don't necessarily work all the time.

This method should work fine on 32bit and 64bit Centos/RHEL and similar rpm based distros 99% of the time, as well as many other distros. It is very simple to accomplish.

It should look like this when finished



Mozilla Firefox is a must have on a Centos 6/RHEL minimal Desktop installation because other browsers use its plugins directory,
so first install Firefox if not installed. You can install from the standard repo (older version) or use version 22 from the Remi repository and which has some extra useful features on it.

$ wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm

$ sudo rpm -Uvh remi-release-6.rpm        

If this is a first time installation you will probably need
rehat-bookmarks also.

$ sudo yum -y --enablerepo=remi install firefox redhat-bookmarks

Once you have the flash plugin for Mozilla, you can enable it for other browsers as needed, usually using a symlink to the file.

Flash version 11.2 is the final release for Linux.

Now download the tar.gz version of flash player

 32bit plugin

 64bit plugin 

Both 32 and 64 bit are identical in format so the same instructions apply to both.

$ tar xvf install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz 

or

$ tar xvf install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz

This unpacks a /usr directory and a libflashplayer.so file, both of which need to be installed.

First, look for a suitable plugins directory with

$ whereis mozilla

You need to have one in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or lib64)

If you haven't got one, create one

$ sudo mkdir /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or lib64)

Places one in the /usr/lib/mozilla folder (or lib64)

Copy the libflashplayer.so into the plugins directory.

32bit 

$ sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

64bit

$ sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

That done, now copy the accompanying /usr folder over to /usr

$ sudo cp -r usr/* /usr

That is all you need to do to install the flash plugin for Mozilla Firefox.

Now open up Firefox and type 'about:plugins' into the address bar and it should show similar to the image above.(Reboot if needed).

If you have the Java plugin enabled also, as in this tutorial,
then it will look like the image below.


Firefox with Flash and Java Plugins.

The above works on the Centos 6 Live CD also.


Older Hardware

Flash Player 11 was compiled to use sse2 and may not work with older Intels (P4s, P3s) and 32 bit AMD systems. To check run

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo                       

and look for 'sse2' in the flags line. Just 'sse' indicates you have an older unit which means you should try Flash Player 10.

Download Flash Player 10 

Then follow the same procedure as above


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