Iceweasel Confusions
 

I know that eventually I will discover how to make it right, but for the present, just doing the obvious and following instructions has got me in a mess, and I could use some help.

I have Iceweasel installed and working on Debian 'Etch", and (as it happens) Konqueror is there as well. We wanted to get Macromedia (Adobe) Flash Player plugin working. There it was in Synaptic, so we did the deed, and it all installed - and did not work!
Try again, this time fetching the tar.gz and installing from root. It all went apparently fine.. but no actual working.

Then - in a bizarre moment, we discovered Konqueror, doing its 'scan for plugins, actually finds the Mozilla plugin first, and gets all working OK. Since no amount of reading/configuring would persuade the plugin to operate for Iceweasel, we settle for using Konqueror.

I find so many places where it seems to be...

/home/(me)/.mozilla/plugins/
libflashplayer.so

/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins
(Two links here - no actual plugin files)

/usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins/
libflashplayer.so
libswfdecmozilla.so
liblinuxprintplugin.so
... and 10 other links to plugins of type .so and .xpt

/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
(similar list as in iceweasel)

and of course the strange situation of Konqueror able to find and use them all, but meanwhile, their proper application is not able to invoke them. So the questions.
1. Is there a default "correct setup", for Iceweasel, and how do we get there?
2. When a site complains of a non-functional plugin in Iceweasel, does one fetch it from the Mozilla site? In the matter of plugins, does Iceweasel need its own compiled versions?
3. How does Iceweasel use the plugins. Is it all done with links?

Thanks for any help.

all those symlinks point to somewhere, i bet they point to the actual flashplayer plugin file...

i can understand your frustration, debian does make a mess of things, the debian developers should be ashamed of themselves...

i place the symlinks in the plugin folder in the directory containing iceweasel.

I find with Iceweasel that when I first go to a flash-enabled site Iceweasel prompts me that a plug-in is needed. Click next and it finds the adobe plug-in and downloads, installs it. No problems with flash in Iceweasel 2.0.0.6 in Etch for me.

A simple apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Will install it in the proper place.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070723 Iceweasel/2.0.0.6 (Debian-2.0.0.6-1)

Shockwave Flash
File name: /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so
Shockwave Flash 9.0 r48

Same here. It puts in /home/brian/.mozilla/plugins.

Good tip, craigevil:-) Thanks, man!

Thanks so much for all the tips.
I just have to say "see - you all have working Iceweasel setups, but they are not all the same setup, and the plugin does not always live in the same path/folder".

Following craigevil's (great) tip, I looked for /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/. Yes, it is there already, but completely empty. Right next to it is a folder "flashplugin-nonfree-unpackdir" which contains yet another copy of"install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz". This is, I think, what happens when, having failed with one approach, we try another sans any attempt at cleanup. So we have ...

1. Use the Synaptic package manager.
2. Use a command line method like "apt-get install" or "aptitude" or dpkg. All these are not guarateed to produce identical setups, but any might well work by itself.
3. Download the plugin, unpack to /root and run the script file. This is what you end up doing if you follow the route mentioned by hitest and BrianL
OK - I did exactly that with the test animation at http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/ and what I get is two possible actions. First is a yellow bar at the top informing me "Additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page". and a "Install missing plugins" button. Unfortunately, the result is a "Plugin Finder Service" box informing me that no suitable plugins were found. Yet another button from "Unknown Plugin (application/x-director) called "Manual Install" actually ends up inviting me to install Netscape 6.0!!! More useful is a link to the Mozilla install page http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/downl...ShockwaveFlash
... where we find the .tar.gz install package.

craigevil's method will be the next to be tried, and maybe some attempt to remove the plethora of generated files and links, some of which (bizarre!!) seem to be trying to point at each other, each assuming the other is the real file :| Thanks folks, I will post what happens.