Installing Adobe Flash 10 Beta in Ubuntu

Some people have found the new version of Adobe’s Flash player to offer greater stability (fewer crashes) in the Ubuntu version of Firefox. Others just like to try cutting edge software. Either way, this is how you install Flash 10 beta in Ubuntu.

Probably the easiest way to do it is to download the .deb file of it from your local mirror and then double-click it.

If you prefer to install the .tar.gz from the Adobe website, copy and paste the following commands into the terminal:

This command uninstalls the Ubuntu repositories version of Flash 9.

This downloads the Flash 10 beta compressed file.

This extracts the files contained in the compressed file.

This command copies the Flash plugin to the Firefox plugins folder.

This command removes the extracted files folder.

This command removes the originally downloaded compressed file.

Below is what the whole process looks like:

username@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree

Reading state information… Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
flashplugin-nonfree
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 160kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
(Reading database … 68660 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing flashplugin-nonfree …
username@ubuntu:~$ wget -c http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
–18:23:37– http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
=> `flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz’
Resolving download.macromedia.com… 72.246.87.191
Connecting to download.macromedia.com|72.246.87.191|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 4,035,433 (3.8M) [application/x-gzip]

100%
[=====================================================
===================================>]
4,035,433 624.95K/s ETA 00:00

18:23:44 (620.39 KB/s) – `flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz’ saved
[4035433/4035433]

username@ubuntu:~$ tar -xvzf flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
install_flash_player_10_linux/
install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so
install_flash_player_10_linux/flashplayer-installer
username@ubuntu:~$ sudo cp install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/
username@ubuntu:~$ rm -r install_flash_player_10_linux
rm: remove write-protected regular file `install_flash_player_10_linux/flashplayer-installer’? Y
username@ubuntu:~$ rm flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz

If you run into problems, post a support thread at the Ubuntu Forums.