Saturday, May 9, 2009

Flock Flash-Player Fiasco

I recently decided to try the Flock social networking web browser. I'll be posting a full review of the most recent version for Linux just as soon as I have finished my evaluation, but for now I would like to address an issue that I encountered, and that I found that others had encountered as well. Although flock browser is based on Firefox, some special care must be taken in order to convince flash to work.

--Flock for Windows--
Since the majority of users will be running Windows, and because it is a slightly easier fix, I will address the Windows version first. First you'll need to open the "My Computer" icon on the desktop, or in the start menu. Then double click on the icon market "C:\", then double click on Program Files, and then the folder marked Flock. Inside of this folder , you should find a file named "install_flash_player.exe", which seems to have been designed to install the flash player in Flock specifically. After first making sure that Flock is closed, double click the "install_flash_player.exe" and a quick installer should run. Once it is finished, just go to your favorite Flash video site(Youtube, etc.), and test it out. This should solve the problem, if not leave me a comment and I'll look into in further.

--Flock for Linux(Ubuntu)--
Next is the issue of the Linux version, which is almost as easy to correct. First download the flash plugin in Gzip format. It can be found here: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/thankyou/?installer=Flash_Player_10_for_Linux_(.tar.gz) . Next, unzip the file and extract the file named "libflashplayer.so" into Flock's plugins folder. The location of this folder will vary depending on which distro you use, however, I installed it to my "home" folder to make things easier. After you have extracted the file, restart Flock and then test it out using the method detailed above. Once again, this solved the problem for me, but if it doesn't work for you, leave me a comment and I'll try to help you out.

Cheers,
-Will