Upgrading to Flash 10 in Debian

Even though the Debian community is very strict about only allowing free software in their repositories, my Iceweasel install came preloaded with Macromedia Flash 9. Regardless of whether this is how things are supposed to be, Flash has since moved on to version 10. Some sites like youtube are already warning users who have lower versions installed that they should upgrade for performance reasons, and Firefox is going to begin to prompt users to upgrade for security reasons.

Regardless of your motivations, having the latest Flash plugin is essential to today’s internet experience, regardless of well placed free software ideals. Luckily, I’ve found a handy tutorial (incredibly, it’s on the Debian Wiki and isn’t horribly out of date) that gives instructions on how to get the latest Flash installed on a Debian system.

It should be noted that the tutorial requires the user to add a non-free repository to their sources list, located in /etc/apt/sources.list file, and that making this change will techinically make your system non stable, in the sense that it will no longer be officially supported by the Debian community. While regrettable, my sources list already contained non-free sources list, as some of my hardware lacks free drivers/firmware, so I’m not terribly concerned.



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