I go to the Mozilla Firefox website, and it seems to insist on downloading the 32-bit version. I am now thinking that Mozilla doesn't build 64-bit Linux versions; does anyone know why that would be the case?

What I have now is some version of Iceweasel 3.0.x on my 64-bit Debian Lenny machine, and it does not display the flash video correctly. I have successfully downloaded Firefox 3.5.3 on my 32-bit Debian Lenny laptop, and it views flash just fine. The flash video I am referring to is at http://www.finewoodworking.com/Skill....aspx?id=32953.

Thanks,
bgoodr

There is a 64-bit version in the 'nightly' builds section:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.o.../latest-trunk/

I can't say how well it works as i haven't used it myself.
Another option is Swiftfox,which has a x64 version:

http://getswiftfox.com/index.html

Or the other option is to install the flashplugin-nonfree from Backports.
I can play the link you posted with using this plugin with Iceweasel.

To me, 32 bit compatibility is a must, so run the 32 bit version (should work) and install the 32 bit flash RPM, well, deb in debian, but I use fedora. I think you should just install 32 bit linux next time.

Thanks very VERY much for everyones suggestions so far. I'll investigate those suggestions further.

For this:

What configuration was that viewed on? 64-bit Linux or 32-bit Linux? What version of Iceweasel? What was "this plugin" referring to, the backport plugin or something downloaded from Adobe and installed using Adobe's installer scripts?

Note that I would be willing to put up with using the 32-bit version of Firefox on a 64-bit Linux box for the browser as a workaround, provided it isn't much trouble to get it working such that Flash works for the websites that heavily use Flash, and provided that is the most stable solution. But I don't want to have to install the 32-bit version of an entire Linux distro just to have Firefox work as expected, since I have other constraints on the 64-bit Linux install other than browsers.

Does anyone know why Mozilla is not providing 64-bit builds, on their site, directly, versus having other sites such as Swiftfox fill the gap with their own builds?

bg

Add contrib and non-free sources to your package manager, then

Iceweasel is Firefox, but rebranded. Firefox is a trademark and the little icon is copyrighted. Debian don't want to provide copyrighted material that are not under the GPL. The application is the same, exactly the same exept the name and logo.

All you need is to install the 64bit version of flash, it will work.

one further note about this. the FF fork that Debian is currently using is out of date. you will be better of apt-get remove iceweasel (and their thunderbird fork as well) and install from source pure FF and t-bird.

yes it is true once you do this, apt-get update/upgrade will no longer update FF or t-bird, but that is ok as they update them self without the need for apt-get or any other package manager from any Linux distro.

the biggest issue with the fork that Debian is using for FF is that most of the top add-ons no longer work with the older vs that Debian is forking from as they have all been upgraded to function with 3.5 and no longer function with 3.0.x as that is the most current vs of Iceweasel from the debian repositories.

I can view the link you posted using Iceweasel(3.0.14),using the flashplugin-nonfree from the Debian Testing repositories.
This is on my Amd64 machine.

Which add-ons exactly?
The main two i use are no-script and adblock plus work just fine with Iceweasel(3.0.14).

Is there instructions on the Mozilla site (I looked, and they don't make it obvious how to build it from source on their main page that I can tell). And of course, I will probably have to deal with installing dev packages if I choose to go that route, which is not unexpected.

Yes, and that is another perfectly valid reason to ditch iceweasel.

I did try the Swiftfox 64-bit Linux version, but basic things are not working, namely, Flash is not working out of the box, so I would have to figure out how to install it using Adobes scripts/installers/whatever. But more insidiously, items in context menus (such as clicking the right mouse button over things) are greyed out completely when the mouse is hovering over those items. Methinks they compiled it using some other toolkit than what Iceweasel used, so I'm giving up on using Swiftfox for now since it is of lower quality for basic functionality than Iceweasel 3.0.x.

And yes, I know about Iceweasel being a rebranded form of Firefox. But the fact that Iceweasel is not keeping up with Firefox is another key reason to ditch Iceweasel.

bg

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/...refox+on+Linux

very clear instructions from mozilla.com

Another option is to download the 64-bit alpha version of Flash10 from Adobe. This solved my problem.

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Then type: su -c tar -zxvf libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins


Good luck.

Very clear instructions to download the 32-bit Linux version of Firefox perhaps, not the 64-bit Linux version. I say this because they have a couple of things that might apply here, one being the Ubuntu instructions, which do not apply to me since I am running Debian and not Ubuntu.

The "Download Firefox from the Firefox download page to your home directory." statement on that page contains the link that should be detecting that this is a 64-bit Linux platform, but it continues to insist on downloading the 32-bit binary.



bg

Thanks jhwilliams. That is the route I went with while staying with iceweasel installed from apt-get packages. This of course means that iceweasel is still stuck at v 3.0.14, but my immediate needs are met for viewing flash. I'll try the other avenues others have suggested at some later time.

Thanks for everyones help!
bg

Hi,

Found this relly useful:

http://wiki.debian.org/FlashPlayer#D...7Lenny.27amd64

bye!