How To Fix Flash Player “plugin is vulnerable and should be updated” On Linux

Back in June last year, I wrote an article about Updating Flash Player to its Latest Version by Using Fresh Pepper Player supplement / alternative.

That was sometime ago, however, now that Flash player state on Linux seems to have deteriorated dramatically, I think it’s a good time to revise that post so that people could be aware Google’s Chrome is not the only resort…

[ In this post I will not elaborate on how and why things became the way they are today in order for it to be short and concise as possible, if you’d like to know more background details I recommend you visit the link above. ]

What you’ll need:

In order to put your hands on the only updated Flash player currently exist for Linux platform, we will need to use the plugin which ships with Google Chrome browser.

So, in case you already have Google Chrome installed – you are all set, you may skip to the installing section.

In case you haven’t – don’t worry you won’t need to install it, we are just going to “borrow” the Flash plugin component from it – hop in to Chrome’s website and download Debian’s package for instance (even if you’re not on a Debian based system).

Next, extract the deb file and go inside that folder >> extract data.tar.lzma and go inside the extracted opt/google/chrome/ folder >> you’ll see a folder named PepperFlash.

We will now copy the folder alongside it’s content to the absolute path:

/opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/

You may want to open a file browser as super user to do that –

Note: if the folder path doesn’t exists on your file system – create it! (we would want to use this specific file path for future compatibility sake)

Installing Pepper Player For Chromium

Since Chromium is the open sourced version of Google Chrome it’s already fully compatible with the flash plugin which comes with Chrome, so all we need to do is just configure Chromium to use it.

1. Make sure you have PepperFlash folder and its content placed at the default path where it belongs, i.e.  /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/ and it should contain the following 2 files:
   • libpepflashplayer.so
   • manifest.json

   In case it’s not there, you may want to search for its location and copy it, or follow the above instructions…

2. Once you’ve verified everything is in place, simply open up the file /etc/chromium/default in a text editor as root user and copy paste the following at the end of it:
   CHROMIUM_USER_FLAGS="--ppapi-flash-path=/opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flash-version=$(grep '"version":' /opt/google/chrome*/PepperFlash/manifest.json| grep -Po '(?<=version": ")(?:d|.)*')"
3. Restart Chromium for changes to take effect.

Installing Pepper Player For Firefox (& other browsers)

In order to have Pepper Flash player working on Firefox and many other browsers as well (since most draw form Firefox’s plugin), we’ll need to install another component which will serve as a compatibility layer to bridge between browsers plugins differences.

The component can be downloaded from the link below, installation instructions, which are pretty much straightforward, are also given in the same link.

This might also be a good opportunity to thank i-rinat for the wonderful plugin-wrapper created by him – thanks!

Now, in order for Firefox to instantly recognize and use the plugin we will need to copy the plugin to Firefox’s default plugins directory like so:

Restart Firefox for changes to take effect.

freshplayerplugin github