jonEbird

[ UPDATE as of 2011-07-10 This post is no longer advisable. Please see my updated post on setting up 64bit Chrome with Flash player for recent Fedora releases. ]

This is a quick howto on getting a 64bit Flash working with your 64bit Google Chrome browser on Fedora. The unfortunate part is that I feel obligated in writing this down for people but it’s really not that complicated after you figure out a few details.

First things first, you need to get Chrome installed. I find it funny that the top hit on google for "chrome yum repo" suggests a yum repo which points to a web server containing only a Readme that states it’s not serving chrome RPMs due to “legal concerns”? Google’s top hit should be it’s own page for Google Yum Repository. There you will find a block of text for your Yum repository which I personally put in /etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo.

Currently, the rpm does not create a plugins directory so we have to create one at /opt/google/chrome/plugins/. Once you have done that, you can visit Adobe’s 64bit Flash page where you can download the compressed tarball. Inside that tarball will be a single libflashplayer.so library which you will now want to either sym link to in the plugins directory or just copy it there.

With all that in place, you are ready to fire up Chrome and tell it about your manually installed plugin. Do that via "google-chrome --enable-plugins". All should be well and instead of testing it on youtube.com, let’s go to pandora.com instead and listen to “M.I.A.” channel. That funky channel seems appropriate for this procedure.

Here is the copy & paste version: (remove the "sudo" if you are root)

# Creating the repo
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo
[google64]
name=Google - x86_64
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub
EOF
# Actually installing Chrome
sudo yum install google-chrome-beta.x86_64
# Creating a plugins directory
[ ! -d /opt/google/chrome/plugins ] && sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins
# Grabbing Adobe's 64 bit Flash player
wget -qO /tmp/flash.html http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html
DLURL=$(sed -n '/^.*a href.*libflashplayer.*tar.gz/s/^.*<a href="\([^"]*\)".*/\1/p' /tmp/flash.html)
wget -qO- $DLURL | sudo tar -C /opt/google/chrome/plugins/ -xzvof -
# fireup chrome with new plugin
google-chrome --enable-plugins

And because I’ve been playing around with the combination of desktop background, Chrome theme and a Pandora skin in a nice, aesthetic color scheme, I’ll share a desktop screenshot of my 64bit Chrome playing some tunes.