installing Flash on YDL4 (was Re: unable to install Klash...)

[Paul Higgins]

On Friday 27 October 2006 22:19, Bill Perrotta wrote:
> Don't you mean Yup is this yellowdog not Fedora.

No, yum is the new version of yup: "Yellow Dog Updater, Modified".  The 
TerraSoft site has a link to the project, which is run out of Duke 
University, I think.

> Another question. I am having a problem finding and installing a firefox
> version for yellloedog 2.1. Where can i download and install this?

I don't know if there *is* a version for 2.1, as that's such an old version 
that Firefox probably didn't exist back then.  Remember that Firefox happened 
when Mozilla split into two (or more) separate apps: the Thunderbird email 
client and the Firefox browser.  You'll probably have to be happy with 
Mozilla and Konqueror.

I installed Firefox using Synaptic, but I could have also used yum.  I've 
modified both my etc/yum.conf and etc/apt/sources.list files to point to 
quite a few mirrors.  Synaptic is basically a GUI version of apt-get, the 
Debian version of yum.  (Despite being a Debian tool, Synaptic works just 
fine on YDL).  But I doubt you can get Synaptic for YDL 2.1.

> Right now i'll work on installing firefox instead. Paul can you post how
> you got firefox to run shockwave flash? and will this enable me to view
> shockwave flash enabled we pages?

I'm trying to remember exactly what I did--I believe the following is 
accurate, though.  I was visiting sites where Firefox was nagging me about 
how I needed to install a Flash player/extension to see everything on that 
site, and so I clicked "Install", which then took me to the Adobe site (Adobe 
bought Macromedia, I guess), and there was a download for Linux.  Here's the 
site (watch the word wrap on this--it's all one line):

<http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Linux>  

So I copied/printed the directions from the Adobe site, downloaded the file, 
and then unpacked the download (it's a .tgz compressed file).  Then I printed 
out more directions from the unpacked file.  At which point I found out that 
the install script is x86-only.  Lovely.  So then I read through the 
directions again, and found some info on doing a manual install/uninstall.  
Then, quite frankly, I did some guessing.  The Adobe instructions gave me 
some clues:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
To remove the Plug-in Player for Linux:

For root users:

- Quit the browser.
- Navigate to the browser's plug-in directory 
(i.e. /usr/local/mozilla/plugins).
- Remove libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

That told me that I needed to move these files into the plugins directory--in 
other words, the reverse of these directions.  The problem is 
that /usr/local/mozilla/plugins doesn't exist!  But /usr/bin/mozilla 
and /usr/bin/plugins do exist, so I copied libflashplayer.so and 
flashplayer.xpt into both of these directories.  I don't know if this gives 
you fully functional Flash capabilities (I haven't gone to enough Flash sites 
to be sure), but it definitely gave me working animations and banners in 
Firefox.  

By the way, for some reason, Firefox uses the same plugin directory that 
Mozilla does--there is no separate /usr/bin/firefox. 

Hope that helps!

-PRH