(UPDATE: I reinstalled FC5 and the Firefox flash update works fine. All the other errors are gone too. It seems that after a fresh FC5 install, I need to update kernel and kernel-dev first before anything else or all heck breaks loose.)

I have a new FC5 install and am trying to get the flash plugin to work. When I try to install it in Firefox I get "unknown plugin" with a "manual install" button. I ran the Linux flash installer, but Firefox still can't show Flash files even though aboutlugins says there is a Flash plugin installed:

Shockwave Flash

File name: libflashplayer.so
Shockwave Flash 7.0 r63

MIME Type Description Suffixes Enabled
application/x-shockwave-flash Shockwave Flash swf Yes
application/futuresplash FutureSplash Player spl Yes

Any help (or links to a solution) would be appreciated.

Some ideas:

* does any flash work (just in case you're trying to display something that requires newer Flash)?
* how exactly did you install the plugin (it might affect)? in Firefox you needed usually to either have Mozilla (the Big Bro[wser]) installed and use the Macromedia's/Adobe's installer to automatically install it, or alternatively extract the package and either copy or link the .so file to your Plugins directory (in the earlier days it did make a difference if you copied the file instead of symlinking it), but nowadays there might even be a Firefox's own plugin installer possibility.

I'd first find some "older" Flash and see if it plays them, to make sure it's not about new unsupported flash versions. Then I'd completely remove Flash and try to install it using some other method; first I'd try Firefox's plugin installer, after it I'd try an RPM for Fedora if there is one (for Ubuntu, for example, there is a .deb package), then I'd try the Macromedia/Adobe installer and as the last resort, read from Mozilla's FAQ how you are supposed to install the plugin. Actually, if it hasn't changed a lot, it's just a matter of copying a libflashplayer.so file to a certain Plugins directory and restarting the Browser, but still a package for your distribution (Fedora RPM) might prove to be easier.

EDIT: still because it seems your plugin really is in use, the reason is probably something else than how it was installed. My first guess was the version of the flashes, but it could be anything..

Thanks.

I discovered I have some other major errors with FC5 even after a yum update(get errors about a libpam.so library not available on sudo, and it won't boot up correctly). If the backup kernel is also munged I'll just reinstall everything and try again.

Flash installer uses a default path to put in the installation files. Check these setting, because fc5 uses another location for Mozilla. Works fine on 32bit architecture.