A long time coming Adobe have finally released a 64-bit version of their Flash Player and it's for Linux.

It's in Alpha but reports suggest it's actually quite stable, so good news all around for us with 64-bit Ibex machines ;-)

• Adobe Flash Player 10 - 64bit Linux

You'll need to uninstall you're current Flash Player via either...

sudo aptitude remove flashplugin-nonfree

Or going into your ~/.mozilla/plugins directory and removing the old version.

To install simply download the tar file relevant to your distro, extract the plugin and drop it into your Firefox Plugins directory ~/.mozilla/plugins

Restart Firefox and you should be good to go,

Swiftfox is like Firefox, but hellishly optimized for your Linux build, you can get it from...

• Go here
• Then download the installer right for your build (if 64-bit, download Athlon 64)

Once downloaded, navigate to the download in Terminal and do,

sudo sh install-swiftfox.sh

Flash

Now to get Flash running first check the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory exists on your machine, if not create it...

mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins

Adobe only provide it as a 32-bit library but with the necessary dependency you can support it so run...

sudo aptitude install nspluginwrapper

Once you've got that you should be capable of handling the 32-bit Flash player,

...grab Flash from here

Download the .tar.gz version, extract it to your desktop, then move the libflashplayer.so into the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory,

sudo mv ~/Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so  ~/.mozilla/plugins

And finally restart Swiftfox, navigate to a flash video here and enjoy faster browsing with Swiftfox + Flash!

Had some problems installing the Aptana plugin into Eclipse 3.2 on Hardy,

sudo aptitude install eclipse

Then,

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge gcj-4.2-base

Replace,

sudo aptitude install Sun-Java6-jdk

Then install remotely as normal

• http://update.aptana.com/update/studio/3.2/
  • Aptana Forums
  • Aptana Plugin

After getting back from vacation in Vegas I decided I needed to sort my laptop out once and for all. So partitioned the drive in two, one with Vista Ultimate and one with Fedora 9.

On top of this I really wanted the Fedora partition to be encrypted and using LVM so I can resize later, glad I did that.

However in all I had two problems along the way,

Fedora 9 Wifi doesn't support TKIP

The first thing which I couldn't fix was the Wifi. I was using WPA+TKIP which is available in the network configuration panel, all good but everytime I tried to connect it'd popup the password entry screen again; really annoying.

Thankfully I found the reason to this, Fedora 9 does not support TKIP even though it's available in the control panel; switching to WPA+AES clears that problem.

Just wish they documented that better ;-)

32-bit Flash on a 64-bit build

Adobe released the Flash 9 libraries to the linux community but only as 32-bit binaries, I installed Fedora using the 64-bit build so with some tweaking managed to fix that too.

• Adding Flash to Fedora

In Terminal do:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'
su -c 'yum install flash-plugin'

Now specifically for 64-bit Fedora builds do:

su -c "yum -y install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-libs.i386 libflashsupport.i386"
su -c 'mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v'

Afterwards close & reopen Firefox and you should now have Flash 9 running on your Fedora 9 64-bit desktop.

It's hard to do but these might help,

• X-Ray, a bookmarklet to examine elements within the document model, similar to firebug's 'inspect'.

• Fiddler, an http debugger for ie 6/7

• IE Developer Toolbar, similar in power to firebug but in no way as comprehensive.

• IETester, full-blown IE6 standalone browser, finally you can test against IE6 on Vista!