[Sussex] Flash (was BCF Working and Crawley)

[Steve Dobson]

Frances

On Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 02:00:57AM +0100, Frances Fleming wrote:
> Perhaps I should explain that I've gone direct to
> http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&P2_Platform=Linux&P3_Browser_Version=Netscape4
> 
> Even though I've been through the Edit > Preferences menu and opened the
> settings to allow downloads, popups, cookies, Java and Javascript, still
> when I click on the Download Now button, absolutely nothing
> happens.Except the Firefox logo in the top right of my browser gives a
> quarter turn then stops.
> 
> On previous occasions, I've tried to install Flash when I've visited a
> site that needs it, and I've got the Macromedia license agreement
> dialog, but then when I've clicked the download button, nothing has
> happened.
> 
> Can anyone help please?

Have you run the installer?  While those nice[tm] people at Microsoft
have set things up so that if you download software to be installed the
browser will automatically run the installer.  Unfortunately there lie 
dragons (like viruses and malware).

On Linux if you download software _you_ also need to take actions to
install it.  That is one reason why Linux is so much harder to write
viruses for Linux.  Non-expert users won't go thorough the hassle 
(they'll just switch back to Windows), and power users know better than
to install software they don't trust.

The page you referenced is a downloads page for a compressed tarball,
which after you have uncompressed and extracted the contents has an
install script that has to be run to add the plugin to the appropriate
browser(s).  As I now have a free (as in beer) Opera browser installed
I decided to do this to get flash to work in Opera.

To extract from the compressed tarball use:
   $ tar -xvfz <path-to a tar.gz file>

Then cd into the dir created:
   $ cd install_flash_player_7_linux

And run the installer:
   $ ./flashplayer-installer

Follow the on screen instructions.

At one point I was prompted with:
  NOTE: Macromedia Flash Player requires two font packages
	to be installed, gsfonts and gsfonts-x11.

To install these packages become root and use the command:
   # apt-get update
   # apt-get install gsfonts gsfonts-x11

I then ran opera from the command line as I happened to have one handy
and it was a good job I did.  Because I saw loads of errors (well two
errors and a warning repeated a lot):
   /usr/lib/opera/plugins/operamotifwrapper-1: error while loading
	   shared libraries: libXm.so.1: cannot open shared object
	   file: No such file or directory
   Warning: XtRemoveGrab asked to remove a widget not on the list
   /usr/lib/opera/plugins/operamotifwrapper-3: error while loading
	   shared libraries: libXm.so.3: cannot open shared object
	   file: No such file or directory

So for those of you how don't think the command line is for them then
you would not have seen this information, and as opera still runs up and
works (except flash) this is information helpful to getting flash working.

Obviously the plugin requires software not listed by the install script.  
I already had the file libXm.so.2 (from package lesstif2) which was
required for mozilla-firefox but I had to install lesstif1
   # apt-get install lesstif1
to get libXm.so.1 installed.

libXm.so.3 is more of a problem.  A search in all package contents on 
Debian's site
   http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_contents
showed that this file was located in a non-free area of Debian.  I don't
have non-free(dom) areas configured by default.  I want to know when I am
installing non-free software, and as debian handles the package dependantices
so well it all to easy to miss if you have non-free in as default.
As I use Debian for work I need to know what non-free software I have 
installed because I may not have a license to use it for commercial
purposes.

As root add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
  deb ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ sarge non-free
Or something like it.  Note this machine is configured for "sarge", if
you're configured for "stable" or "testing" then use that instead.

Then run the updater and install the libmotif3 package:
  # apt-get update
  # apt-get install libmotif3
I now recommend that you remove the non-free line for /etc/apt/sources.list
and "apt-get update" again so you can't install software from a non-free
source - you wouldn't want to knowingly run non free software for fear of
the Non-Free Police [Geoff on this list :-) ].

I re-ran opera and low, I now only get the XtRemoveGrab warning, well it
is only a warning and I've seen many motif warnings over the years so lets
just ignore that.  But flash still doesn't work for opera - oh well, opera
is only there for web page testing so I don't need (or want) flash to work.

I did to the install again for mozilla (just incase it was a newer version
than what I had already installed - Also note that I only needed lesstif2
for mozilla not lesstif1 & libmotif3).

I did got the following warning during the mozilla install:

  NOTE: Please ask your administrator to remove the xpti.dat from the
      components directory of the Mozilla or Netscape browser.

I ran locate and got back a little list of all the xpti.dat files I have:
  $ locate xpti.dat
  /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/xpti.dat
  /usr/lib/mozilla/components/xpti.dat
  /usr/lib/openoffice/program/components/xpti.dat
  /var/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/xpti.dat
  /var/lib/mozilla/components/xpti.dat
  /var/opt/openoffice.org1.9.73/program/components/xpti.dat

I haven't removed any of them (I would suggest doing a move to a
<file>.safe so you can put the files back if it breaks something else)
and mozilla-firefox works fine and flash works within it - so I'm happy.

Hope this helps
Steve

-- 
Let the machine do the dirty work.
		-- "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Ritchie
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