[CentOS] Adobe Flash Install Woes

[Mike A. Harris]

Chuck wrote:
> 
> I am having a hell of a time getting adobe flash to work on a recent 5.2 
> install.

 From a stock CentOS 5 system, fully updated do the following:

1) Install Adobe's yum repository configuration:
rpm -ivh 
http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

2) Install flash-plugin with yum
yum install flash-plugin

3) Start, or restart firefox.

This should work on any x86 or x86_64 installation of CentOS 5.  If it 
does not, then it is possible that someone has misconfigured something 
in the system, or in the user's firefox configuration that is 
conflicting or messing with flash.  Before messing with anything in the 
system to try and "fix" it, create a new dummy user account, and fire up 
firefox in the new user account to see if flash works in this default 
state.  If it does, but it does not work in your own user account, then 
something in your user account's firefox configuration might be 
interfering with its ability to see flash for some reason.

You can confirm that flash is present by going to "about:plugins" in the 
firefox location bar.

Once firefox is showing up in about:plugins and flash sites are 
displaying, you may encounter other problems with flash.  Visit YouTube, 
and if you notice that flash videos are incredibly slow and gimpy and/or 
audio cuts out, or the video/audio freeze for long periods of time 
especially on startup, then do the following:

1) Press CTRL-0 to unzoom the current webpage, and do not use the 
firefox CTRL+mousewheel zoom feature.  Reload the page to see if the 
video plays ok now.

2) If CTRL-0 above allows video to play back properly or even just 
"better", then your X server might not be configured correctly.

3) Check your X server log to see if "EXA" acceleration is being used. 
If it shows that "XAA" is being used, then you may not be able to use 
the firefox "zoom" feature on flash enabled webpages unless you enable 
"EXA" acceleration for your video hardware (assuming the driver you are 
using supports EXA).


You may or may not experience other performance or video/audio glitch 
issues with flash.  Mozilla's bugzilla is chock full of tonnes of flash 
issues on Linux.

Anyhow, I hope this helps you get things working.  Good luck.

TTYL