Flashplayer and Linux Mint

So a vulnerability was found on Flash that made Firefox disable the Flashplayer until people updated their plugin.  Adobe released an updated version of the last non-Chrome version of Flashplugin for the update but I seemed to be running into some issues with the browser not picking up the latest version.  So, what I did was re-download the latest version of Adobe flashplayer.  Then, I copied libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so and /var/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so.  Then, restarted Firefox and checked the add-ons.  Finally the latest version was recognized.  Back to regular programming.

Firefox and 64-bit Flash

Just a teeny tiny note here.  I realized when I download Firefox from the official website, my 64-bit flash player plugin stop working.  As it turns out, Firefox is giving me 32-bit versions of the browser.

To get the 64-bit versions, check here:

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/linux-x86_64/en-US/

Another note is that Flashplayer 11.2 has a bug where nvidia users get inverted colours.  Seems to be related to the hardware acceleration.  Just decided to downgrade instead.

Backports done!

I left the building overnight as Firefox8 didn't seem very fast to build. When I did install it, I managed to get through a few quirks in the install. It's some dependency on installed packages that were about to be overwritten anyway, so I added packages to install until dpkg didn't complain anymore. Here are the ones I added:

• firefox
• firefox-3.5
• firefox-3.5-branding
• firefox-3.5-gnome-support
• firefox-gnome-support
• firefox-branding

Firefox 8 is running here on Karmic. I went ahead and updated firebug as well. This is sweet!

1 down, 1 to go...

Thankfully, yasm-1 was not a pain to backport. I checked the versions and it was fine. Building only took a minute or so and now Firefox8 is building. We'll see how that goes.

Ack! More backporting!

Man, one website that I use for work has decided to block me from using it because my browsers are too old. Google Chrome doesn't seem to support Ubuntu 9.10 and Firefox is just too old. I'm not a fan of downloading Firefox from the website if I can get the deb packages to work. I think you know where this is heading.

Yes, I decided to yank Firefox8 from the launchpad ppa and do my own backporting to Karmic. You can get the packages I used here. I did the usual to prep up my build machine and I also double checked the control files just to make sure nothing was wrong. I thought the versions of the libraries was fine and hoped this would be a painless exercise, but that wasn't to be.

Building the deb package, I realized that apt-get build-dep for Karmic missed out the following.

• libcurl4-openssl-dev
• xvfb
• imagemagick
• yasm-1 (>= 1.1)

The three of them I could install just fine, but I found yasm-1 to be an oddity as I'm pretty sure yasm packages were built without the -1 suffix. I decided to take the risk and build it too hoping it's not too much of a big deal. We'll see how that goes.