Problems with flash and native mozilla

[Dwayne MacKinnon]

Martes Wigglesworth wrote:
> Greetings.
> 
> I have an issue with my mozilla install.  I am unable to figure out how,
> or what people get flash7 to work with mozilla.  And I also have trouble
> getting anything to work that I need, while maintaining a working
> desktop.  Hence, if I want to install mplayer, I have to upgrade
> everthing that also makes my desktop, KDE 3.1.4, work with the initial
> install.  Also, the only reliable desktop/production applications seem
> to be the few that come on the iso install cd.  Anyone have any advice
> on this?
> 
> Respectfully,
> 
> Martes 

Martes,

Your question is better suited to the freebsd-questions mailing list, 
rather than the freebsd-hackers mailing list, so I've cc'ed the response 
to your letter to the former list rather then the latter.

The port that enables mozilla on FreeBSD to use flash is 
www/linuxpluginwrapper. Since you're using KDE 3.1.4 I'm going to assume 
that you're running FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE. That's fine; the functionality 
that linuxpluginwrapper needs is present in 4.9.

However, support for Flash 7 has only just been added to 
linuxpluginwrapper, and is listed as alpha quality only. In other words, 
it's more likely to not work than work.

As far as upgrading goes: have you upgraded your ports collection using 
cvsup? This is the best & safest way to keep things up to date on your 
system. The Handbook has information on using cvsup in Appendice A.5 
(http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html). 
A sample supfile for ports is  /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile.

For managing your ports, I strongly recommend the sysutils/portupgrade 
port. Simply log in as root, cd to /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade and do
make
make install clean

Then do a man portupgrade. It's a great tool.

If you haven't been upgrading your utilities, you should be aware that 
mozilla has come out with several new releases of its browser since 
4.9-RELEASE, including some security releases to block exploits in the 
browser.

You should strongly consider updating your desktop. The advantages of 
KDE 3.3 over 3.1.4 are too numerous for me to go into here. If you don't 
want to use the ports system to compile a new KDE, KDE packages are 
available for installation using pkg_add (or portinstall -PP if you've 
installed portupgrade.) Directions for installing and upgrading KDE can 
be found at http://www.freebsd.kde.org.

Good luck!
DMK