Install stand alone Flash player on 64 bit Ubuntu

We are running our Flex unit tests on a 64 bit Ubuntu machine as part of our continuos integration environment. In order to run the tests we need to have the stand alone version of the Flash player installed. Unfortunately there is not yet a 64 bit version of the flash player projector for linux so to run our tests we need to use the 32 bit version.

These are the steps needed to install the 32 bit stand alone flash player under a 64 bit Ubuntu:

1. Download the 32 bit Flash player projector from http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

   > wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/10/flashplayer_10_sa.tar.gz

2. Unpack the flash player executable and make sure you put it on your path.

   > tar -xzvf flashplayer_10_sa.tar.gz

   Now, if you try to run the Flash player, chances are you will get an error message similar to the following:

   > flashplayer
flashplayer: error while loading shared libraries: libX11.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

   This is because the 32 bit Flash player also requires 32 bit versions of certain libraries to be installed. If you run ldd (print shared library dependencies) on the flash player executable you will be presented with a list of the required libraries:

   > ldd flashplayer

3. Install required 32 bit libraries. Luckily, most of these libraries can be installed by installing a single package using apt-get:

   > apt-get install ia32-libs

   If you now run ldd on the flash player again you should see that the library dependencies have been resolved and, if you are lucky, the flash player will now launch.

Good luck!

Note that these were the steps required for our installation, another platform might require additional steps or libraries.