Everybody (?) knows that in theory, if you have 64-bit Firefox on 64-bit Linux (x86_64), you can use nspluginwrapper to install 32-bit plugins, like the Flash Player. There’s some instructions here for example.

However, those instructions are flawed in two regards.

Firstly, Flash Player 10 doesn’t come with a .xpt file any more, but that’s not apparently a problem.

Secondly, and more mistifyingly, nspluginwrapper seems to require you to give the absolute path to the plugin’s .so file, for some reason. So if you get an error like this:

$ nspluginwrapper -v -i libflashplayer.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: libflashplayer.so: cannot open
shared object file: No such file or directory
nspluginwrapper: no appropriate viewer found for libflashplayer.so

Then try again with the full path to the plugin:

$ nspluginwrapper -v -i /home/bsm/clegg/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
Install plugin /home/bsm/clegg/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
  into /home/bsm/clegg/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so

Restart Firefox, and away you go, joy! No feeling for stability yet, but I’ll post again if there are any problems.

Incidentally, I first tried installing nspluginwrapper via yum, and got a whole bunch of unsatisfied dependencies:

Error: Package devhelp needs libgtkembedmoz.so, this is not available.
Error: Package devhelp needs libxpcom.so, this is not available.
Error: Package devhelp needs gecko-libs = 1.8.0.12, this is not available.

Then I just tried installing the RPMs from the nspluginwrapper home page (first the one marked Viewer, then the one marked Plugin) and it worked like a charm.

Hat tip to this thread on the Ubuntu Forums for finally revealing the key bit of information about absolute vs. relative paths.

UPDATE: Aaargh, sound doesn’t work. But that seems to be the fault of my ALSA drivers rather than Flash or nspluginwrapper. Apparently Flash can only use ALSA for sound, and not any of the other various Linux sound architectures, and only OSS works on this PC…

Andrew.