How-To: Install Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 was released earlier this year, on December 17 at the Adobe MAX 2009. This release comes with several new features and numerous bug fixes.

To install Flash Player 10.1 Beta 2 in Ubuntu 9.10, just follow the steps below:

First, remove your existing Flash plugin. Do this depending on whether you installed Flash from the repositories or manually. If you installed Flash from the Ubuntu repositories, typing:

sudo apt-get remove --purge flashplugin-installer

should remove your current installation of Flash. If Flash was installed manually, the plugin should be located in the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory, where ~ is the home directory. So, to remove it:

rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Next, download the archive for the new Flash player from here (direct link here), or alternately you can type in a terminal:

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_1_p2_linux_121709.tar.gz

Make sure the current working directory is the one where you saved the archive and uncompress it:

tar -xzf flashplayer10_1_p2_linux_121709.tar.gz

Next, create the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory (if it doesn't already exist):

mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins

And copy the plugin inside it:

cp install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins

Now restart Firefox and this should be all.