Updating Adobe Flash Player¶
Firefox on Slackware Linux¶
In your original install image of Slackware in a directory called extra/ is what is called a SlackBuild. You should copy this file over into your installation so you can edit this very file every time you need to upgrade (or install) flash.
I personally keep a directory for items I plan to compile from source (or pseudo source in this case). I keep the flashplayer-plugin.SlackBuild in a sub-directory of the source dir. You should download the latest flash into this directory (you will want the file of the type .tar.gz and configured for the proper architecture, although flash usually detects it for you).
Most recently (25 Nov 2011), I downloaded the 64 bit version to install and the file was named install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz and the version the flash site gave me was 11.1.102.55 so at the top of the slackbuild file I changed SRCVER and BLDVER to 11_1 and 10255 respectively. Then because the SlackBuild that comes with 13.37 is slightly antiquated (as you can see near the top of the file) I changed SOURCE to
SOURCE="$SRCDIR/install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz"
Then run the slackbuild and install it. You should notice that it installed libflashplayer.so to either /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins or /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins. For me, I also had to cd into the firefox directory (see above) and make the plugins directory and then link that shared object (so) in the plugins directory for firefox to work (8.0.1 at the moment). The above should look as follows:
user@darkstar:/usr/download/source/flashplayer$ sudo \
./flashplayer-plugin.SlackBuild
[snip]
user@darkstar:/usr/download/source/flashplayer$ sudo mv \
/tmp/flashplayer-plugin-11_1.10255-x86_64-1.txz ./
user@darkstar:/usr/download/source/flashplayer$ sudo installpkg \
flashplayer-plugin-11_1.10255-x86_64-1.txz
user@darkstar:/usr/download/source/flashplayer$ cd \
/usr/lib64/firefox-x.y.z # or /usr/lib/firefox-x.y.z
user@darkstar:/usr/lib64/firefox-x.y.z$ sudo mkdir plugins
user@darkstar:/usr/lib64/firefox-x.y.z$ cd plugins/
user@darkstar:/usr/lib64/firefox-x.y.z$ ln -s \
/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so ./ </pre>
After restarting firefox, this should work fine.