Getting Flash to Work With Prism in Linux
Posted on January 19, 2008
4 Comments
I’ve mentioned a few times that I like to use Mozilla’s Prism to run some of my web applications. Today I attempted to get Google Talk going in Prism on my little Linux Xubuntu laptop and hit some challenges.
Specifically, no Flash.
That’s odd. On my Windows machines Prism runs Flash stuff just fine. But hey, Linux ain’t Windows and clearly there are some environmental differences.
The solution seemed easy enough. A comment on the original Mozilla post announcing Prism addresses this exact issue (no flash) and suggests all I need is a symlink from my Firefox plugins folder to my Prism plugins folder (that comment also notes that there isn’t a Prism plugins folder by default).
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins plugins
I did that. Fired up Prism and… no dice. Same story.
Next I opted to just copy the plugins directory. Nope, same deal, same error.
In poking around, I found a plugins directory under prism/xulrunner. In a fit of desperation, I copied the Firefox plugins directory to there as well. Still no luck.
After some more research I found that I could browse to about:plugins to see what plugins exist. In Prism, that means create a new shortcut with that URL. I did and… it listed Flash!
I idly clicked my Google Talk Prism shortcut and *bing* up popped a functioning site! Ok, what the heck? I can only theorize that visiting about:plugins flipped a bit somewhere and got things working.
Being a curious sort of person, I undid all my hacks and copies. I confirmed I was back to the no Flash error. I then recreated the symlink and it works just fine. *shrug*
Hopefully the symlink statement will help someone else (likely me, on my next Linux install!) and maybe the about:plugins is interesting too.
Tags: flash, google-talk, linux, Prism, xubuntu
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4 Responses to “Getting Flash to Work With Prism in Linux”
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You can check-out http://www.kalaj.org/blog/2008/04/08/how-to-install-flash-player-in-mozilla-prism/
for the flash-installation walkthrough.
Please comment if you have any problems…
I’m trying to do the same thing and have done just about everything that you have. Any other suggestions? I’ve copied the plugin, tried the about:plugins, but it doesn’t show that I have any installed.
I copied the plugins from firefox to the newly created ‘plugins’ dir and it worked great! I wanted Flash so that I can use it to listen to Pandora Music site in a separate browser from FF. I am using Ubuntu 8.04 and it is now working flawlessly. Thanks for the post.
Hi Michael — glad that the post was helpful