Yes sorry, I did get your text first time and maybe I've just been out of luck

I have tested to do that on other sites. sr.se tv4.se and some other too.

Not sure if I did it on cbc.ca/national but I can test it again.

And if the method Isaac mentions fails, and installing from whatever package manager fails, there's the manual way to fall back on. Download the .tar.gz version, and follow the instructions given on the website.
Not sure if it applies to live CDs, though.

I recently installed fedora 9, and it comes with a Firefox 3.x browser. It seems that it was pretty easy to install the flash plug-in from Adobe. I haven't torture tested it, but I did look at a YouTube video or 2.

Big friendly smile. If it was that easy then you could at least
hint at how you did it? Maybe many others could be helped by
your example?

I'm pretty sure I'm thinking of fedora... I've been playing with several distributions lately including Debian.

In Firefox, I got the "needs plugin" when I went to the YouTube page, so I clicked away to the Adobe download page for Linux. They give you directions for 3 approaches: .tar.gz, rpm and ?

I went with rpm (which I think was zipped). I downloaded the "flash-plugin-xxx.rpm.zip" file to my "/home/Download" folder, then I unzipped it... I opened a terminal for command line, and
(Did I have to switch to superuser? I don't remember)
I navigated to /home/Download/, and typed:

$ rpm -Uvh flash-plugin<TAB-to-complete> <ENTER>

And that was it. The directions were on Adobe's website.
I do have to admit that the sound doesn't seem to be working on my flash plugin with Firefox right now, but I'm pretty sure that it did.

Looks easy and maybe it is easy when it works but I have done such
many times but being a noob I had no idea what was suspected of me
and I am extrememly poor at following instructions.

so it has failed more times than it has succeeded.

So fedora is a kind of debian? or is it the other way around?
Are there different way of toing linux then.

All the frugal installs I have are slackware inspired distros.
None seems to be Debian. Are debian different?

How many different main linuxes are there?

Dude!
You are at LinuxQuestions.org... there are tons of information here about different distributions of Linux.
There are a number of "families" of Linux... Debian derived, Ubuntu, fedora/RedHat, OpenSUSE, and on and on.

A good place to check out distributions is: distrowatch.com

A good place to get an overview is: here, and linuxreality.com

LinuxReality is a podcast 100 ~30-60 minute episodes which walks you through a number of things.

As to the flash issue. What distribution of Linux are you running? The "rpm" information I gave you is good for the "rpm" based distributions like fedora, but if you are using Debian, that uses "apt" to manage software packages.

bbneo

Dude!

I ask about the practical experience of which distro that out of the box
survives longest on youtube without locking and which distro that has
the best mplayerplugin already installed so newbies can use it.

Even if one apt one still has to know how to get it going.
In some distros there is long long instructions on doing CLI
things that need sudo and so on.

not easy at all for a newbie.

Because the question is not distribution dependent.

Any 32-bit version of any distribution should work fine with the Flash plugin you find on Adobe.com. For 64-bit versions of distributions, you additionally need nspluginwrapper to get Flash to work, but it can be flaky.

Restricted media codecs are available for almost any distribution. For Debian and Debian based distributions you have to add a multimedia repository from http://debian-multimedia.org/ to /etc/apt/sources.list to get the Flash plugin and all those codecs and other "goodies".

I don't challenge the accuracy of what you say here.

I say that some of us noobs are not used to do such things.
At least I have failed each time trying to do what you say.

It is easy if you know what to do but could be impossible if
your not good at following instructions cause there are too
many things one have no clue on how to do it. Despite them
saying how. Cause they have all the knowledge that make it
works for them which make is impossible for them to forsee
that a noob of my sort have no clue on such.

And I tried to make it clear that I asked which distro

that out of the box. The live cd without adding any installation
or RPM or Get apt or what ever, working out of the box works
with mplayer plugins for BBC and CBC.ca and all the otehr national
TV stations online.



And that is specific to the distro and the very iso and not
independent of the distro at all.

so you are right about what you talk but it isn't what I ask.

What's difficult about downloading the Adobe Flash player from their website and running the install script? If you have any trouble, please let us know exactly where you're getting stuck.

Also does Windows support Flash "out-of-the-box"? You still need to install it right? Same on Linux as well.

I'm not trying to be rude or anything. I'd be the last person to do that, but for legal reasons many distributions avoid shipping Flash and other restricted media codecs, but installing them is usually a very trivial issue, so you shouldn't have trouble on any distribution of Linux.

As I said, for Debian, you can add the Debian multimedia repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list from http://debian-multimedia.org/ (follow the instructions there) and simply apt-get the packages you need (including the Adobe Flash Plugin). Other distributions will have some similar package mechanism or you can simply download it here:
http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/downl...Platform=Linux

Ubuntu is also a distribution where getting Flash is relatively easy - in fact, if you visit a site with the Flash content, you should be able to just point and click your way to installing the Flash plugin.

Hard to say which one has "the best" - because there really _is_ only one - the different distributions might use different versions of it, but recent distributions will have the same recent and equally well working plugin.
As for flash:
Adobe's flash player is probably nowhere installed by default - license issues I guess.
The free "gnash" is included in some distributions - but it has its limits still and is not what everyone would want.

How long you survive at youtube depends more on the powers of your machine - and on the strength of your nerves
not so much on what distribution you use and how you installed the flash plugin.

There is (unfortunately for you maybe) no short way around finding out how to follow the instructions...

If you are a Noob, you're probably better off using a distro that have the plugin right off the bat. There are many these days. There's no need to try to install it.

I think a majority of OS user never even bother to install anything unless they really have to. They just want it to work. Linux tend to have a higher percentage of tinkerers because the OS started our as a tinkerer OS.

Yes Paul Siu I should have made that clear in my first post but I am
very ad at findign words for such.

I wanted others experience of which distro that has the best
and complete built in such from out of the box.

I think that Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS are supposed to be pretty good "out of the box" with media plugins.