Ubuntu – Get latest Flash player on Ubuntu

adobechromiumflashgoogle-chrome

I know, it's been asked before but I couldn't really get a satisfying answer for some details/backgrounds and I guess it's an important question for many.

Some application seem only to be running with Adobe Flash 15 (or at least I know it does, because I have that version on my Windows Partition).

The official Adobe website says:

NOTE: Adobe Flash Player 11.2 will be the last version to target Linux as a supported platform. Adobe will continue to provide security backports to Flash Player 11.2 for Linux.

Some search on the web like "Ubuntu Adobe Flash 15" or similar does not return any good websites.

I found something that says Google's Chrome Browser should do the job (using a "pepper-based version"), and for Chromium there is an ppa.

Is it impossible to use this for Firefox too? Would it be a privacy risk?

Are there no alternative projects (I know it's closed source but there are so many so very bright people out there using something similar to wine but just for the plugin….)?

How about the Mac-Version? Shouldn't someone be able to port that one to Linux?

Best Answer

Flash player is completely dead for all operating systems as of 2021.

Install the latest version of flash player

These instructions will install the latest version of flash player for Chromium and it will also be updated automatically. In addition to installing flash player for Chromium, it will also install/reinstall Adobe flash player for Firefox, and it will also be updated automatically.

To install the latest version of flash player search the Dash (in Ubuntu releases before 17.10) or the Show Applications dashboard (in Ubuntu 17.10 or later) for Software & Updates and open the Software & Updates window. Click the Other Software tab in the Software & Updates window, and put a check mark in the checkbox to the left of where it says: Canonical Partners.

^{Software & Updates in Ubuntu 17.10}

Click the Close button to close the Software & Updates window.

Open the terminal and type:

sudo apt remove pepperflashplugin-nonfree # remove pepperflashplugin-nonfree if it's installed
sudo apt update  
sudo apt install adobe-flashplugin   
sudo apt install browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash # 16.04 and later

Original answer

Don't use the instructions under this heading anymore because they are obsolete. Follow the updated "Install the latest version of flash player" instructions instead.

I found something that says Google's Chrome Browser should do the job (using a "pepper-based version"), and for Chromium there is an ppa.

There is no need to add a PPA to your software sources to install Pepper Flash Player 15 in the latest version of Chromium web browser from the Ubuntu Software Center.

In Ubuntu 14.04 and onward, Pepper Flash Player can be installed using the Ubuntu Software Center.

If a more recent version of Pepper Flash Player has been released and you want to update Pepper Flash Player to the latest version, you can do this from the terminal using the following command:

sudo update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --install

Pepper Flash Player cannot be updated with the following command anymore on 32-bit OSs since Google ended support for Chrome on 32-bit Linux in March, 2016. If you ~~are using Ubuntu 32-bit~~ were using Ubuntu 32-bit before March, 2016, you can update Pepper Flash Player to the latest version from the terminal using the following command:

sudo update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree:i386 --install

Either of these two commands will download the latest version of Google Chrome (the file is larger than 40MB) and then update only the Pepper Flash Player with the more recent version of Pepper Flash Player that is bundled with Google Chrome without installing Google Chrome.

If updating Pepper Flash Player to the latest version fails with an error like this:

ERROR: failed to retrieve status information from google : W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:  
1397BC53640DB551

It happens because Google changed its signing key. To fix it run the following commands:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 1397BC53640DB551
gpg --export --armor 1397BC53640DB551 | sudo sh -c 'cat >> /usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree/pubkey-google.txt'

...and then try to update Pepper Flash Player to the latest version again.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Adobe will stop releasing new versions of Flash – what will happen to flash support in Ubuntu

Well, basically if we want to keep up with Flash Player future versions and corresponding features and improvements, other than security fixes, we will have to switch to Google Chrome. Adobe went on to say that future updates to Flash Player beyond version 11.2 for Linux will be available only through the Pepper API that will run on Google Chrome and not through a download from Adobe directly. Mozilla hasn't provided any statement about this that I know of so far, so it is expected that Firefox will just use the last version provided by Adobe for the years to come.

I also wish that html5 takes over the Internet, however some functionalities still rely strongly upon Flash player, such as media streams and it will take some time until we get rid of it.

Read this and this for additional details:

There has been some heavy discussion about this as well at Ubuntu Forums. Check those out: 1 2 3

Ubuntu – use Chrome’s Pepper Flash with Firefox

This answer may be outdated due to recent changes to Adobe and Flash. This answer is left here as is for historical purposes.

Firefox is dropping support for NPAPI soon, which may make this answer out dated and invalid. It may only be possible to get Flash in Chrome, and only Chrome, at some point, such that there is no Firefox solution.

Since Adobe no longer supports Flash on Linux, Chrome is one of the remaining options that ships with Flash included. This is a Chrome special case, as detailed in the Flash Roadmap from Adobe in the Linux subheading under Personal Computers.

You can use Pepper Flash (called "Fresh Player") on Firefox. Webupd8 even commented on it here and how to get it working (the linked article was posted on May 29, 2014 and may be out of date). The plugin may be usable as it seems to be suggested regularly in the Ubuntu IRC chats as a solution.

The below is extracted from the Webupd8 post:

NOTE: The wrapper used for this is in ALPHA stage and is likely to be EXTRAORIDNARILY unstable.

To summarize the steps they detail, though:

Install Fresh Player Plugin in Ubuntu (via PPA), by using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install freshplayerplugin

The easiest method to use this means that you will unfortunately need to install Google Chrome for this to work. This is becauseFresh Player Plugin is just a wrapper for libpepflashplayer.so, so it needs this file which is bundled with Google Chrome. The easiest way to get this file is to simply install Google Chrome Stable - download it from here, then install it.

2a. Alternatively:
There are other ways of getting libpepflashplayer.so but I won't post installation instructions for all of them here.

Instead, I'll just list them below:
- If you're using Google Chrome Unstable, create a symbolic link from /opt/google/chrome-unstable/PepperFlash to /opt/google/chrome/ or change add a freshwrapper.conf file and add the /opt/google/chrome-unstable/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so path there - see step 3
- You can install Pepper Flash using 2 other ways: via the installer available in the official Ubuntu 14.04 repositories and via the Pepper Flash PPA which is also available for older Ubuntu versions - once installed, then you'll need to create a symbolic link for Pepper Flash to /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so or see step 3 for how to change the path to it.
Remove the flash plugin installed by APT: Remove/Purge these packages from the Software Center flashplugin-installer adobe-flashplugin adobe-flash-properties-gtk adobe-flash-properties-kde or just run in a terminal:
```
sudo aptitude --purge-unused purge flashplugin-installer adobe-flashplugin adobe-flash-properties-gtk adobe-flash-properties-kde
```
The Pepper Flash package doesn't replace the original library file, this is why up to this step, you can see both versions of the Flash plugin in the Add-ons page, and there's no way to be sure that Firefox will use the latest version. And you just can't disable one without disabling the other (If you disable one and restart, both will be disabled).
Optional (only use it if you want to tweak various settings): configure Fresh Player Plugin

Here you'll find an example Fresh *Player Plugin configuration - to use it, save this file, rename it to freshwrapper.conf and copy it under ~/.config/freshwrapper-data/

Use this configuration file to change the path to libpepflashplayer.so or to tweak the sound buffer if you have shuttering sound. Don't use it to enable hardware acceleration yet as it doesn't work properly for now!

The configuration options available in this file are pretty self-explanatory - you can configure the lower and higher bound for the audio buffer size, change the Xinerama screen used to acquire fullscreen window geometry (default: 0), change the path to libpepflashplayer.so along with command line arguments (like enabling hardware video decoding).