I've been using Incognito for awhile, mostly as a privacy matter to prevent sites from gathering marketing 'profiling' information, but also just for general surfing, particularly when I already have it up and running for the other. Good tool!

Lately I've started to encounter sites that used to work, but now give messages saying that I need to update to a later Flash (I'm assuming 10 since that's the latest) in order to get their multimedia to work. I'm familiar with installing and updating Firefox Extensions and the like, and with enough time can usually figure out how to update programs in Ubuntu, but have not yet had to do the same with gentoo, and my history is, in general, more on the Windows side of things anyway.

I see on Adobe's site that they offer Linux versions in tar.gz, yum, rpm, and deb package formats. I've done some limited amount of digging on gentoo, and from what I've read, it can use one of several package managers, but none of the ones mentioned are the formats above.

I realize that unless I want to create a new ISO (and no, that's not on my to-do list), I'll have to manually update it every time I boot Incognito and find myself at a site that has a problem, and I'm ok with that as long as it isn't horribly time consuming.

My basic question then is, what is the best way to go about the task at hand and get those flash files showing up again? Is the best way to use something that emulates Adobe, but if so, has someone written a version that emulates Adobe Flash 10? If not, how do you get Adobe's version into gentoo?

Thanks in advance

Open a terminal (e.g. Alt+F2, type "konsole") and type the following commands:
It'll take a while downloading the file since it'll be done through Tor. I suggest that you install Incognito on a USB drive and set up a persistent home partition -- that way you'll only have to do this once. If that's not an option you might want to disable Tor temporarily for downloading the file. In that case you can do the following intead of the wget command above:

Thank you very much for the quick reply! I'll try that as soon as I have a few free minutes and unless you hear back on this thread, assume it worked.

Ok, I finally had time to go through the procedure above. I believe that I understand what each of the commands does, and can confirm that, at least as far as the file manipulation goes, the end result is what you wanted:


But, when I go to the problem websites, I still get the same message. I have tried both re-starting Firefox, and doing the above plugin install immediately after booting Incognito, and before running Firefox for the first time.

I also notice that in my regular (non-Tor, working) Firefox, I see a separate tab for Plugins when I go into Tools/Add-ons, but in the Firefox within Incognito, I don't see the Plugins tab. Are they disallowed as a class within Incognito in the same way that the menu item to update Firefox itself is greyed out?

Any other thoughts?

That seems to be correct (ok, I didn't think about "flashplayer-installer" which need not be there -- you can remove it). However, I'm a bit surprised by the user ("gentoo") and hostname ("dhcppc6") in the above quote; these should be "incognito" and "livecd" respectively in any recent Incognito release. Which Incognito release are you using?

Alright. I've got a few questions which might help narrow this down:

• After you have upgraded Flash player as per the instructions above and restarted Firefox, which versions of "Shockwave flash" are reported in the plugins list (see below if you don't know how to open it)?
• If you right-click on any Flash applet, the last item in the menu says "About Adobe Flash player X"; is X 10 or 9?
• If it's not dangerous for you to disclose the following, which sites are affected?

I just tried using my own instructions in the 2008.1-r1 release, and it worked. Of course, both versions (the old 9.x and the new 10.x) will be installed at the same time, but version 10 seems to take precedence so it should be ok.

On your normal system you're probably using Firefox 3.x where that feature was added. In Firefox 2.x, which is used by the current Incognito release, you can see the plugin list by typing "about:plugins" in the address bar.

I'm not sure exactly where to look in the system, but based on other history, I believe it's 2008.01.1.09.1. I'm not 100% sure on that though. True, I saw the newer version that you mentioned in your post and downloaded it, but haven't taken time to test it out yet. I'm now suitably ashamed and will do so in the next few days.

X=9

YouTube is a fairly generic example (the videos).


See above on my probably using an older Release. I'll try the new Rel in the next few days and see if it acts differently. There are several other annoying bugs that I've been living with and maybe it will fix those too. I'll let you know. In the meantime, if you think of anything else, let me know.

PS - Something I just noticed:
When I download a YouTube video, it downloads as a .flv file. When I look at the aboutlugin window, it shows .flv registered to mplayer:

File name: mplayerplug-in.so
mplayerplug-in 3.45

True, I'm still not getting Adobe upgraded to 10, but even if I were, would it matter, if mplayerplug-in was acting on the .flv files and it doesn't know what to do with Rel 10 code?

Hmmmmm

I believe my instructions will only work with the 2008.1* releases. A quick way to determine if you are using it or not is to see what Firefox extensions/addons are installed as default: NoScript ==> pre-2008.1 release, Torbutton ==> 2008.1*.

I'm certainly no expert on flash, but AFAIK there's a big difference between flv files (flash video I suppose) and the swf files (flash applets). In the case of youtube, I believe its player is a flash applet that plays flv files (and mp4 files for the higher quality clips). In any case, mplayerplug-in won't interfer.

NoScript 1.3.1

Then you have 20080109.1 (A.K.A. 2008.0 after the new versioning scheme). Upgrade to 2008.1(-r1) and you should be able to use the new adobe flash player. Neither NoScript nor CS Lite/CookieSafe is present in the new releases. Instead Torbutton is used, which is more secure for severeal reasons. Note that Torbutton disables all plugins (like flash player) for security reasons when it is enabled, so you'll have to disable it (which won't disable Tor though). After all, plugins could be dangerous for your anonymity, and perhaps adobe flash player (which is a proprietary binary blob) in particular.

When installing Flash Player 10 to my Sabayon, I just untar the install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz and copy libflashplayer.so to /opt/firefox/plugins. I search this location by viewing ebuild and searching libnullplugin.so which is shown when I type aboutlugins at Firefox.

Btw, I cannot emerge some packages since recent packages are masked.

I hope this can help you. The location might be different. Just another idea.