Adobe Flashplayer for Galeon on 64 bit Ubuntu 9.04

I was excited about the new Ubuntu 9.04 released just a few days ago. In fact, so excited that I installed the release candidate instead of waiting for the final release, knowing that it will be impossible to download during the first few days. Anyway, it’s cool, it’s slick and it boots in less than 15 seconds! Of course, one problem that you run into on 64 bit is the lack of Adobe Flash player – at least if you want to avoid installing 32 bit compatibility libraries. Here is how the problem is solved.

First, you need to download the Adobe Flashplayer 10 browser plugin from Adobe. You can get it here. It’s a .tar.gz file containing a single shared object (so file). Since my primary browser is firefox, I installed it into /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/

That makes flash work all right in firefox, but it still didn’t work in Galeon – another lightweight web browser that I like to use a lot. As it turns out, Galeon looks for plugins in the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory, so the problem was solved by simply creating a symbolic link to the libflashplayer.so I just installed in /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/ – that’s it!