installing adobe flash player 64 bit on debian

somewhat recently, adobe has pulled all support for 64 bit flash player on linux. debian has also remove the support from it’s non-free archives so the flashplugin-nonfree package no longer works properly. i find that gnash and swfdec are pretty lacking and are not compatible with all websites which is a major problem for me. after searching online, i found a 64 bit copy of libflashplayer.so and wanted to install it the debian way using update-alternatives. here are the steps to install it properly:

  1. first we want to remove the official flashplugin-nonfree package:
sudo aptitude remove --purge flashplugin-nonfree
  1. download libflashplayer.so from here.
  2. extract the file to a temporary location using:
tar zxvf libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so_.tar.gz

you should now see libflashplayer.so

  1. from the same temporary location, execute the following commands to make a common location for the file to be stored and then to copy the file there:
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/adobe-flash
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/adobe-flash/
  1. next, you will need to create an update-alternatives entry using the following command (copy and paste both lines and insert it on the command line as a single command:
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flash-mozilla.so \
flash-mozilla.so /usr/lib/adobe-flash/libflashplayer.so 20

--install indicates that we are adding an entry, /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flash-mozilla.so indicates the symlink we want to add an option to, flash-mozilla.so indicates the update-alternatives name, /usr/lib/adobe-flash/libflashplayer.so indicates the file which you are adding, 20 indicates the priority.

  1. now we just need to set the new flash player to be the default:
sudo update-alternatives --config flash-mozilla.so

make sure to choose the option for the newly created /usr/lib/adobe-flash/libflashplayer.so:

There are 2 alternatives which provide `flash-mozilla.so`.

  Selection    Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
          1    /usr/lib/gnash/libgnashplugin.so
*+        2    /usr/lib/adobe-flash/libflashplayer.so

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 2
Using '/usr/lib/adobe-flash/libflashplayer.so' to provide 'flash-mozilla.so'.
  1. now open up iceweasel (firefox) and navigate to http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15507.html and it should show the version of flash as LNX 10,0,45,2.

and that should be it! if you want to navigate to any flash based site or adobe’s flash test page you should see the plugin working. this has currently been tested on debian lenny (stable) and debian squeeze (testing).