2 Ways to Install the Latest Flash Player in Ubuntu 11.04

In this tutorial I'll explain two different methods of installing the latest version of Flash Player in Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. The first one is the manual way, which means we will have to download the Flash plugin from the Adobe website and copy it manually in the ~/.mozilla directory. The second way is straightforward by using Ubuntu's multiverse repositories. This tutorial applies for the 32-bit version.

Install Adobe Flash Player Manually

First, we will need to download the .tar.gz archive from the official website. The current version is 10.3.181.22. Next, open a terminal, go to where you saved the archive and uncompress it:

tar -xzf install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz

After uncompressing it there will be a directory, called usr, and the actual plugin, libflashplayer.so. We'll need only this file. The next step is to create a directory called plugins inside the ~/.mozilla folder, where ~ is your home directory (e.g. /home/username/). To do this type:

mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins

And now let's copy the plugin inside the newly created directory:

cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla

This should do it. Restart Firefox and Flash videos should be working now. This location (~/.mozilla) is a folder where most of the web browsers are looking for the plugin, not just Firefox. So once it's set up in there Konqueror or Epiphany will be able to use it too.

Install Adobe Flash Player from Ubuntu's Repositories

Flash Player is also shipped in Ubuntu's multiverse repositories. To install it using this method, open a terminal and type in the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

The difference here is that this method installs it in /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so, while the manual one lets you install as normal user.

Install from the Repositories Using Ubuntu Software Center

This is the graphical way of doing exactly what we did in the previous method so if you did that already there is no need to repeat it. Ubuntu Software Center is a friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface) frontend to APT, the package management system used by Ubuntu.

To start it, go to the Applications menu, then click on the Ubuntu Software Center entry:





Now search for flashplugin in the search box in the top-right. You'll see two listings appearing:



Double click the Adobe Flash plugin entry and click on the Install button in the new tab that appears:



You will be prompted for your user password in order to gain admin privileges:



After the installer completes Flash should be properly installed.