Pepper Flash installer

2016 OCTOBER 26 -- UPDATE

As of Google Chrome version 54, the Pepper Flash plug-in is no longer bundled with the browser. Pepper Flash may now be downloaded on its own from Adobe:

    https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions

(The older NPAPI version of the Flash plug-in continues to be available as a download from Adobe, as it always has been.)

For Ubuntu users, the recommended solution is now to enable the Canonical "partner" repository and install the "adobe-flashplugin" package:

    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Chromium/Getting-Flash

This is now an all-in-one package that will install both the NPAPI and PPAPI versions of the Flash plug-in. and enable them as appropriate for installed Web browsers.

The old PPA description is below. Please note that the package(s) available here will only disable a Pepper Flash plug-in installed by a previous version, to avoid security vulnerabilities.

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PEPPER FLASH FOR CHROMIUM ON UBUNTU

This repository provides the pepflashplugin-installer package, which will download and install the newer "Pepper" (PPAPI) version of the Adobe Flash Player plugin for use with the Chromium Web browser on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. The package is similar to Ubuntu's official flashplugin-installer in that it does not include the plugin itself, but instead downloads the plugin and installs it automatically. (Specifically, it downloads the latest Google Chrome package, extracts the Pepper Flash files, and installs only those. Google Chrome itself is not installed nor otherwise used in any way.)

Some information on the Pepper Flash plugin and how it differs from earlier versions of Flash may be found here:

    http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google-partnering-for-flash-player-on-linux.html

SUPPORTED UBUNTU RELEASES

The pepflashplugin-installer package may be installed on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) or newer, for the amd64 architecture. (Google dropped support for i386 as of March 2016.) It has not recently been tested on older releases of Ubuntu.

TROUBLE INSTALLING?

Note that if you install pepflashplugin-installer soon after Google releases a new version of Chrome, the installation process may fail to download the plugin. Google's download site does not make available any version of Chrome but the latest, so only a matching version of pepflashplugin-installer will work---unfortunately, while the source package should be updated here (in this PPA) shortly after the new Chrome release, Launchpad's build queue may delay the corresponding binary packages for several hours.

Check the upper-right-hand corner of this page. If the "Latest updates" sidebar shows pepflashplugin-nonfree with a status other than "Successfully built," you may want to install the package at a later time.

MAKING CHROMIUM USE PEPPER FLASH

Once the pepflashplugin-installer package is installed, you will need to configure Chromium to use the plugin. Open /etc/chromium-browser/default in a text editor and add the following line to the end of the file:

    . /usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/pepflashplayer.sh

(I.e. a period, then a space, then the filepath.)

Restart Chromium, and load the chrome://plugins page to verify that the plugin is active. (Note that if you see a Flash plugin with a version of 11.2 or lower, then that is an old, non-PPAPI version of Flash. A current version of Pepper Flash will be 11.7 or higher.)

ALTERNATIVES

Debian officially supports Pepper Flash with the pepperflashplugin-nonfree package, in the "contrib" section. It is also available in Ubuntu's "multiverse" section.

    https://packages.debian.org/testing/pepperflashplugin-nonfree

    http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/pepperflashplugin-nonfree

This package implements the download and update mechanism differently; notably, the Pepper Flash files are updated using a standalone script instead of "apt-get upgrade". It is more robust to the download errors described above in TROUBLE INSTALLING?, but requires some additional work to enable automatic updating of Pepper Flash.