ncc74656's Journal: Configuring Flash on AMD64 Gentoo

There's a plugin for Firefox called nspluginwrapper that lets you use 32-bit plugins (such as Flash) on 64-bit Firefox. There isn't an official ebuild for it yet, but the Gentoo Bugzilla has one filed under bug #138454. Here's what I ended up doing to get it working:

1. Grab the files from Bugzilla and put them in your Portage overlay (/usr/local/portage/net-www/nspluginwrapper is a good place). Use ebuild nspluginwrapper-0.9.90.1.ebuild digest to download the source tarballs and build the digest.
2. Add net-www/nspluginwrapper ~amd64 to /etc/portage/package.keywords.
3. Install Flash, then install nspluginwrapper:
   emerge netscape-flash && emerge nspluginwrapper
4. Build user-mode ALSA OSS emulation, if it's not already installed:
   emerge alsa-oss
5. Fix your Firefox shortcuts so that Firefox is called by the ALSA OSS wrapper. At a shell prompt, you would start Firefox with aoss firefox instead of just firefox.

The mucking about with ALSA OSS emulation is necessary to get sound to cooperate with the KDE sound system; if you're not using KDE, maybe you don't need to do this. I wasn't getting any sound until I fixed it. So far, I've tested it with ZipperFish, Homestar Runner, and YouTube, and they all work.

On other distros, you should be able to grab the appropriate tarballs and get nspluginwrapper working that way.

Edit: (5 Aug 06) Kernel-mode and user-mode ALSA OSS emulation don't interfere with each other AFAICT, so it's not really necessary to get rid of kernel-mode emulation.

harumph!

[nocomment]

And they say Linux isn't ready for the masses yet!