How to install Adobe Flash Player on Linux

Last updated on February 20, 2013 by Dan Nanni

Adobe Flash Player is a run-time environment freely distributed by Adobe for streaming rich media and executing rich Internet applications. Adobe separately maintains a Linux version of Adobe Flash Player. Here is how to install Adobe Flash Player on Linux, and how to run Adobe Flash Player on your browser via its plugin.

First, download a Flash Player binary (*.tar.gz) from the official Adobe website, and extract the content into a temporary directory. Here I assume that the target Linux system is 32-bit based.

$ mkdir tmp_dir
$ tar xvfvz install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz -C ./tmp_dir

Go to the temporary directory, and you will see a folder called usr and a shared library file named libflashplayer.so. Copy the usr folder into the root directory of your system as follows.

$ cd tmp_dir
$ sudo cp -r usr /

Now in order to use Adobe Flash Player in your browser, you need to install its browser plugin as well. The file called libflashplayer.so is the Player's browser plugin.

If you are using Firefox web browser, there are two ways to install the plugin.

The first method is to install the plugin in a user-specific plugin directory which is located in ~/.mozilla/plugins.

$ mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins
$ cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins

The second method is to install the plugin in a system-wide plugin directory for Firefox.

$ sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

If you have installed Firefox in an alternative location (e.g., /opt/firefox), you will need to install the plugin in the corresponding plugin directory (e.g., /opt/firefox/plugins).

Finally restart Firefox.

If you are using Google Chrome, you don't need to install Adobe Flash Player and its plugin, since Adobe Flash Player is already built into Chrome, and it gets automatically updated with Chrome upgrade.

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