Sunday, June 28, 2009

How to: Install Flock with Adobe Flash Player on Fedora

FWD from:
http://fabdango.net/2009/05/how-to-install-flock-25-with-adobe-flash-player-10-on-fedora-11-leonidas-without-using-the-terminal/
And I add some additional information.


In the following tutorial I’ll show you how to install Flock, the social web browser, and how to enable Adobe Flash player on Fedora 11. The guide is Flock 2.5-Fedora 11-GNOME specific but it should basically work for any Mozilla-based web browser on any Linux distribution using any desktop environment. You can achieve this without even using the terminal or any command line.


1. First, you’ve to get Flock from its official download site. It’s a compressed file (.tar.bz2) containing the full application. It’s enough for running it but it’s not an installer. Save it anywhere you want. You can use the following command to decompress the compressed file:
tar -xjvf flock-2.0.3.en-GB.linux-i686.tar.bz2

2. Once you saved Flock, extract the file where you want the program to be located. I did it at /home/fabian/Software/flock

3. At this very moment you should be able to run Flock just by executing the /flock/flock-browser file, but you won’t have any shotcut to it and won’t be able to show flash content.

4. Next step is to get Adobe Flash Player from its official download page at Adobe.com. Select the .tar.gz file for Linux and save it in your computer. You can use the command as follows to decompress the file:
gzip -d install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz
tar -xvf install_flash_player_10_linux.tar

5. Open the file you’ve just download and extract the libflashplayer.so file to /flock/plugins/ for enabling the flash player. It also works if you extract it to /home/user/.flock/plugins

6. The previous step should be enough for making everything work fine, but truth is that Flock will crash. As soon as you load any flash content, the browser will close. This is because the libfreebl3.so library included by Mozilla doesn’t work properly. For solving this, you must go to the folder containing Flock (/folder-you-chose/flock/) and delete the libfreebl3.so file. This will foce the application to use the file included by Fedora, located at /lib/libfreebl3.so, so it won’t crash. This is enough for making Flock play flash content. Next steps will show you how to add nice shortcuts to your desktop.

7. Right flick the Applications menu at the GNOME panel. Select Edit menus. At Aplications -> Internet select New Item. Type: Aplication;
Name: Flock;
Location: /folder-you-chose/flock/flock-browser;
Comment: The social web browser (that’s optional, of course).
About the icon, I suggest this one.
Finally, click OK and you’re done, Flock will be at your applications menu. For creating shortcuts on the GNOME panels or desktop, just drag and drop the entry you’ve just created.

No comments: