Updating flashplayer

Last night I had the house to myself for a time so I figured I’d stream the Arizona/ Oklahoma St. game and watch it on our flatscreen TV. I hadn’t had the opportunity yet and it seemed a good one to test out the HDMI port on my 1015PN.

So I configured my 1015 to use the Nvidia ION graphics, plugged in the HDMI cable to make sure both screens were recognized when X started and then brought up ESPN3’s website. But when I clicked on the link to view the game, flashplayer refused to run properly.

So I went through a bunch of steps to try and get it working. I installed chromium, I went to Adobe’s website to test the flashplayer (it was working), I even tried disabling the WiFi and connecting via ethernet. All to no avail.

The only other thing I noticed through all my efforts was that I wasn’t running an up-to-date version of flashplayer. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to update flashplayer either. The plugin package that I have for Opera was properly up-to-date, but there isn’t a repository package to make sure flashplayer is current.

Once again, google and the debian wiki’s saved the day. Updating flashplayer is as simple as running the following command as root:

update-flashplugin-nonfree --install --verbose

For those interested, this command is run as a post install hook when the plugin package is installed.

After running the update command, my flashplayer was updated to RC1 for version 11. I restarted Opera and lo-and-behold, ESPN3 came up and worked.

Too bad the game was over by then.