Software

Flash in Fedora 13

To get flash working in F13 (i386), visit the Adobe Flash site, select YUM for Linux, and accept the download.

Then, as root:

# rpm -ivh adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

.. and then import the provided GPG key:

# rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

To confirm that yum can now access Adobe RPM packages, check to see if /etc/yum.repos.d/adobe-linux-i386.repo exists, and that it contains:

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[adobe-linux-i386]
name=Adobe Systems Incorporated
baseurl=http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/linux/i386/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

Then, it’s simply a matter of installing the required packages:

# yum install flash-plugin alsa-plugins-pulseaudio libcurl nspluginwrapper

During yum operation, you’ll notice the error Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum. This cannot be avoided as we are dealing with third-party packages. To read more about the error, visit James Antill’s blog entry.

NB: Flash in Fedora 13 is still a CPU-hog, though I’ve now found that this applies to Flash in Linux in general. Where Flash in Windows Vista on the same box would use roughly 10-15% CPU time, Fedora would see 50-60% CPU usage. The problem is compounded by multiple flash sources on a single page - such pages employ flash-based advertisements that, without fail, degrade system performance.