[Sussex] Flash on Etch AMD64

[Steve Dobson]

Gavin

On Sat, 2008-02-02 at 00:55 +0000, Gavin Stevens wrote:
> I recently built myself a new AMD64 machine to replace the old AMD300 K6
> that died just before my presentation in November.

Welcome to the wonderful world of 64-bit computing.  Don't things run
nice and fast now? :-)

> I am very happy with the new machine, but there doesn't seem to be a
> suitable version of Flash for amd64.

Adobe (to the best of my knowledge) do not provide their flash player
for AMD-64 Linux.  However as AMD64 can run 32-bit as well it is  
possible to  set up a 32-bit chroot environment and then run a 32-bit
iceweasel to get flash to  work.

At least that was the old way of doing it.

> I have a couple of apparent solutions I found on the www that I will
> try, but I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience of
> solving this problem. (Any free alternatives to Adobe Flash are also
> welcome).

Recently a 64-bit wrapper for the 64-bit iceweasel has been developed so
you can run the 32-bit flash plugin.

If that sounds all to complicated for you then just:

   # apt-get install nspluginwrapper

Here is a webpage on it:

   http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/debian/amd64.jspx

However, this new package is only available in lenny (testing) and sid
(experimental) if you are running etch (stable) you are going to have to
either:

1). Use the 32-bit chroot mode.  I never bothered with this.  If I
needed to surf a site with flash (i.e. youtube) then I would move to my
32-bit laptop to do it.

2). Upgrade to lenny.

I have switched both my AMD64 workstation and my i686 laptop to lenny
for some months now.  In fact the workstation has been on lenny for over
a year.  I've had very few issues.  

If you do take the lenny route then I would recommend going duel boot
for lenny and etch.  With disks being so big these days using 10G for
lenny and 10G for etch is really a no brainer.  This just means that you
need to partition your disk so that you can share the same /home
partition or, do as I did, and put the second boot on a second drive.

Hope this helps.
Steve