[PLUG] 64bit Flash player plugin

[Ben Love <blove+plug@kylimar.com>]

With a fresh install of Debian Lenny, I installed Iceweasel (3.0.6).
This is an amd64 installation.  Of course, I wanted to install the 64bit
flash plugin, which is still alpha for now.

I found the plugin at
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html.  It's a tar.gz file
that contains only libflashplugin.so.  The version I got is: 10.0 r32.
In case your really paranoid (:D), the md5sum is:
 9903881108ff7cd954a3adf0d00185d3  libflashplayer.so

So, I put it in /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins (though the directory had to
be created since this was a fairly fresh install). The permissions were
normal for a plugin (755, root:root).  And in Iceweasel, about:plugins
now showed the Shockwave Flash plugin.

However, as soon as navigate to any page that requires the plugin,
Iceweasel immediately closes with 'Segmentation fault'.  Removing the
plugin "fixes" the problem, so it's definitely the "cause".

My first guess was a missing dependency.  So I ran ldd on
libflashplayer.so.  It produced a whole list of files (too long for
here!), but every one was found.  I was ready to give up, until my
friend Aaron had a brilliant idea:

Download the official 32-bit .deb package for Ubuntu 8.04 from
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/.  Obviously, the .deb won't install
because its the wrong architecture.  However, if you use:
 $ dpkg-deb -e install_flash_player_10_linux.deb
it will extract a DEBIAN/control which lists all the dependencies.  I
manually went through each dependency with apt-get and found that I was
missing three:
 libnspr4-dev
 libnss3-dev
 libcurl3

Once I installed those three packages, everything worked!  I thought
some of you (and Google) might be interested.  I found other people
reporting 'Segmentation fault', but no real helpful answers.  The
strange part was how ldd didn't report the dependency problem.  (As an
aside, strace 'Aborted' every time I tried to run it on Iceweasel before
it even completed loading.)

Ben

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Ben Love
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