May 7th, 2010 Thomasso
This is for my friends who have either upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, or just did a fresh install, and are having problems with their Flash and Java for web sites like www.pogo.com. If you have installed from a fresh installation, or did a major upgrade from the last long term support release, more than likely your Flash and Java have been reconfigured.
The first part of this how-to is installing Flash, and the second part deals with installing Java and adding the plugins for FireFox, which are easy to follow, but they look daunting and seem labour intensive, but trust me, they are not.
PART ONE
Flash is not open source, it is propitiatory software, meaning that you cannot freely reconfigure it, or copy it and write to it, and is licensed. I personally have some issues with having it, especially on my open source machine, but because it is so wide spread on the net many web sites use it; it is practically unavoidable.
There are two ways of getting it. First is from the repositories used through synaptic (Ubuntu). Although I prefer to use that version of flash, I have found that in my travels it has some bugs that makes some of the web sites not function so well. The second, is to use Adobe Flash Player’s software, which is of the better of the two. I will direct you to use Adobe here.
You can find the download page here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
Once at that page, you should see, “Download Adobe Flash player”, “Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.45.2 Linux,” the current version at the time of this writing. Below that you will see a small drop-down box that you can click on that will have the following four options: choose: “.deb for Ubuntu 8.04+” Click on it, and the file should start downloading onto your hard-drive after you agree with the terms and conditions of the software.
This file should download quickly.
Once the “install_flash_player_10_linux.deb” has finished, double click on it and the installer will open and begin installing it on to your system.
Next, I recommend that you install the flash plugin for FireFox, called FlashGot. You can get it by clicking on tools –> Add-ons, in the FireFox menu, and choose the tab “Get Add-ons.” Then search “FlashGot,” in the search box, and once found, click “Add to FireFox.”
And that is it. Restart FireFox for the plugins to take effect and Adobe Flash to run.
To test to see if your Flash is properly working in FireFox, I would recommend that you try this web site : http://www.barbie.com Why? This is one of the most Flash ridden web sites I have ever seen!
PART TWO
Now for the Java and Java plugin for FireFox. I would only start this process if you plan on playing games over at pogo.com, otherwise, just ignore this section.
You need Java to navigate through Pogo and play the games that are on that web site. This link is the best site I have seen for installing and setting up Java to work with FireFox for Ubuntu. These Ten plus steps look like a lot hard work, but it is not. The whole process should take you about 15 minutes, and once done you will have the proper Java and Java plugins running with FireFox. Please click on the following link to get to the Java website where the instructions are.
Click here for installation instructions: JAVA. (You are reading the left-hand column!)
Note: if you are running the 64bit version of Ubuntu 10.04, you can find those instruction their also.
If you want, please leave me some feed back here and let me know if this was helpful or not. Good Luck and happy gaming!
***NOTE: After Aug 2010, I have turned off the comments. I am getting too much comment SPAM. This page does get about, on average, 5 hits per day!
Posted in Blog and Web Tech, Nifty Plug-ins, Software | Comments Off