4. Macromedia Flash
Fedora won't distribute from their site because Macromedia's license
doesn't permit it, but there are no other legal barriers to using the RPMs
at http://macromedia.mplug.org/.
Follow those directions, dropping the Macromedia repository
configuration in your /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory.
It should look much like this:
[macromedia]
name=Macromedia for i386 Linux
baseurl=http://macromedia.mplug.org/rpm/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://macromedia.mplug.org/FEDORA-GPG-KEY
|
Then do the installation:
Installing this RPM should put the plugin in your Firefox
plugin directories (and Mozilla's as well).
You can test your flash support at the
official test
page. Note that you may have to kill and restart your browser
after installing the plugin; I tried the Flash test immediately
and it crashed Firefox.
There's a gotcha: The Macromedia plugin works only for 32-bit Intel
boxes. It completely fails on an x86_64 running in 64-bit mode (in
general, 32-bit plugins won't work in a 64-bit browser). Currently
there are three projects addressung this problem:
gplflash1 is the
orignal GPL Flash plugin. Only handles SWF up to level 4.
gplflash2
half-works, with painful amounts of flicker, and frequently crashes
Firefox. This rewrite of gplflash has been abandoned in favor of
gnash.
gnash
promises full support for SWF up to level 7, but is still in early
development and surrounded by warnings.
I think the right stopgap on 64-bit systems might be to build and
install gplflash1, but as of 21 Mar 2006 I can't because it needs
an X header file I cannot yet find the right RPM for. This may
change as the dust settles around FC5.
Free eBook: 
