Update:
I was asked “Why not apt?” As it turns out, the repositories still have Flash 7 listed in them. Nevertheless, this article may be a better/different way to install Flash 9, especially as it looks like it would include automatic updating, and it uses a more standard way of updating (which generally should be via apt; the tricky issue as always is when one wants something not in the repositories).

So earlier this month I installed Flash 9 for Linux on my Firefox from a HowtoForge article. Flash is one of those necessary evils*, I suppose, but it gets more difficult to ignore entirely so while I refuse to use it myself, I do install it so I can see what the heck is going on in some of the sites I visit. Not to mention that YouTube and VideoEgg both use Flash (the latter version 9 in particular).

To install it, I went to the Adobe download site. It automatically detects the incoming OS, so this step needs to be done from the Linux OS. This brings up a tar.gz file which I downloaded and saved. Using a terminal window, I unpacked it via

tar xvfz install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

That gave me a new directory, which I cd’d to. I ran the installer:

sudo ./flashplayer-installer

After getting the root password, there’s some information and verbiage, until eventually it asks:

Please enter the installation path of the Mozilla, SeaMonkey, or Firefox browser...

At this point, I entered /usr/lib/firefox — more on that in a moment. After doing this, it chugged along for a few more seconds before informing me it was done. So now I fired up a Firefox window and all looked well. This was back in the first week of February.

Then about a week ago, I started noticing little oddities. Some of the places I was visiting started using something called VideoEgg, which simply would not run — it just spun in place forever as if it was downloading. I got very hit and miss behaviors, so I checked my plugins on Firefox via about:plugins. Lo and behold, it said I had version 7! Scratching my head, I went through the same process as above, checked again, and it showed 9. This kind of thing made me grumpy, especially when I spotted the same problem next time I started up Firefox. This time I kept searching on “Shockwave” in the about:plugins page and voila! I found I had both versions installed; and the behavior depended on which came up first.

I knew, from that plugin page, the relevant file name is libflashplayer.so. So I used a terminal window and looked for it using

locate libflashplayer.so

and what I found was a copy in /usr/lib/firefox/plugins as well as in ~/.mozilla/plugins. So I renamed the one in .mozilla (as having the older date) to another name, shut Firefox down, and started it up again. This time only one version of Flash (yay!) and at version 9 (yay!). It turns out that Firefox pretty much looks at four places: the global Mozilla and Firefox directories, and the local (home account) Mozilla and Firefox directories. It will find plugins in all of them (and probably a few more for all I know) so using any of these directories in the initial flashplayer-installer script will “work” but if it isn’t the same directory that the previous flash installation resides in, that double plugin situation will occur.

So, what I would recommend before installing Flash 9 is to first see where any older flash plugins are residing (via the locate command above) and either use that as the directory to give to the original flashplayer-installer script, or clean up afterwards, as I did.

And have I got a test site for Flash..

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*Look at the date on that Flash article!. There are numerous other reasons to hate it as well, but the mockery it makes of accessibility issues, particularly for the visually impaired, is the number one for me.