Hello, this is my first post. For the last couple of years I have installed various versions of Linux on my computer both dual boot and multi boot. I was trying to find a distro which, people with limited OS knowledge would be comfortable with. I finally settled on two – Mandriva 2006 Official and Linspire.

My wife who is reluctant to learn anything about an OS has been using Mandriva 2006 for the last few months. So far she has been happy with it. She is a film buff so she browses many different sites. One of the sites requires the installation of flash player. After much trial and error I got the installer to run by doing the following -

1)Saved the downloaded file to a folder temp1 (which I created)
2)Double clicked on the file and copied the unpackaged files to a folder temp2 (which I created)
3)Opened a terminal and typed CD temp2 and then ./flashplayer-installer

The installation completed successfully, but I am unable to verify it. Nothing shows up in Mozilla under help.

Would appreciate your advice/comments on my method. Some of my family and friends who are still running older versions of MS Windows have expressed an interest in switching to Linux. I have undertaken the task of providing them with simplified step by step instructions on how to perform some of the basic tasks such as installing plugins.

In Mozilla or Firefox if you go to the URL it will give you a list of the installed plugins ( or a message if there are no plugins installed).

I am using Gentoo amd64, so there is no Flash Player for my usual browsers, but under my x86 browser that I installed to use flash, a simple "emerge netscape-flash" got the job done, but I do not know if there is any such package for Mandriva.

I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to flash. The only bit I can help you on, is that the konqueror web browser has flash 7, so any sites that has 7 or lower, konqueror should work just fine.
I was told to get flash 8, was to download the 32 bit version of firefox. Where that is, I have no clue at all. Flash 9 for linux won't be until 2007, spring maybe, hard to say.

Thanks. My plugin is there. As an interim measure I might try to upgrade to version 8.5 by downloading the windows version and installing with wine.