Flash Player 9.0 available for Linux (plus an MT update)

Second things first tonight as Six Apart announced a slight update of Movable Type. The new version — 3.34 — has some security fixes plus native support for FastCGI. I upgraded ManuEnvi to 3.34 tonight and did the configuration for FastCGI. The application does seem to be running quite a bit faster, but the true test will be if leaving comments is speeded up.

The other thing I wanted to share tonight is that the finished release of Flash Player 9.0 for Linux is now available. It had been in beta up till now. I’ve tested it on a few video intensive sites, and it seems to work nicely.

If you’re running openSUSE just like me, then I’d recommend removing Flash Player 7.0 before installing 9.0. Just go into YaST and select Software Installation. Go to Search and search for “flash.” If that has a check next to it, then it is installed. Click the check until it turns into a trash can (as in, “oh yes, let us delete this foul Flash 7”). You may be prompted that removing flash player violates the prime directive or some bullshit like that but just say ignore the rule and uninstall.

Installing the new Flash Player 9.0 for Linux is very, very easy. Just go to the handy download site:

http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayerlinux

You can grab the tarball if you want, but I’d recommend going with the RPM. Download the RPM to your desktop. If you want to get stupid, you can just double-click the icon and the package will be automagically installed. If you’re into Linux because it’s fun to do things the CLI way, then just frizzle fry up a terminal window and go to the Desktop folder (probably just type ‘cd Desktop’), then type:

rpm -i flash-plugin-9.0.31.0-release.i386.rpm

And one thing to remember about long filenames in the BASH shell is that you can simply start typing the filename then hit the Tab key, and the shell will complete the rest of the name. Handy.

The advantage of the RPM over the .tar.gz file is the ease of install/uninstall. Also it’s easy to probe RPM to find out what version you’re running. Something like this would work:

rpm -qa | grep flash