LinuxQuestions.org - Flash Player 10 and older Ubuntu.

Before people start telling me I need to upgrade to 8.04, yes, I know 6.06 is old, but I have a working system, and have no desire to risk losing all I have, or spend a couple of weeks getting everything back together because a few sites have starting requiring Flash Player 10.

This is more of an informational post, than a request for a fix.

I have been trying to get Flash Player 10 to work in my Ubuntu 6.06. I did try the download via .deb for Ubuntu, but got a library error, and the install did not work. (See post: Flash Player - ERROR: Your glibc library is older than 2.2.)

I pulled the tar.gz file, unpacked it and copied the libflashplayer.so to the .mozilla/plugins directory.

Even though the file exists, any time I visit a site with flash content, I am told I need to install the flash plugin.

All right, I think to myself, let the Firefox browser get it. (Firefox 2.0). I click on install the plugin. The browser goes it's merry way,gets the file installs it (I get the message Firefox finished installing the missing plugins: Adobe Flash Player Installed) , and lo and behold, when I go to display the page with flash content I get: Ta Daa... Plugins are required to display all the media on this page. With a Button to install missing plugins. Yes, I have verified that Firefox did in fact pull down the latest flash player and install it in the plugins folder.

If I go back and restore the old libflashplayer.so file in the .mozilla/plugins folder, Flash works fine. This is Flash PLayer version 9.0.

I guess my main gripe with this is Adobe is providing a version of Flash Player 10 that works fine on XP, which is older than my Ubuntu 6.06, but version 10 of Flash Player on my Ubuntu is useless.

Which brings me to the nut of the problem. If you want to run Flash on older versions of Ubuntu, you better make sure you have access to the older version of the Flash Player.

This shouldn't be much of a problem until web sites start insisting on the latest version of Flash Player.

Just for reference:

Flash PLayer 9, with a size of 7040036 created on Tuesday, 19 June 2007 works fine.
Flash Player 10, with a size of 10022452 created on Tuesday, 18 Nov 2008 does not work.

I would post version 9 on a web site, except I don't know if Adobe would be dinging me for making available un-authorized copies of their older Flash Player, which by the way, does have some security problems.

If however anyone has figured out how to get flash player 10 working on Ubuntu 6.06, it would be nice to know how you did it.