Could We Make The Flash Install More User Friendly on Linux?

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There’s a funny/cool post over on Content Consumer about a guy who let his girlfriend lose on a copy of Ubuntu 8.04 and asked her to do some basic things like download a music album, draw a picture, and find the capital of Bosnia. One of the tasks was to go watch a YouTube video. Well Ubuntu obviously doesn’t come pre-installed with Flash, so this posed a bit of a problem:

Second task: Watch a video on YouTube.

(note: this is a problem specifically with YouTube – it detects whether or not you have Flash using JavaScript and then puts a link to Adobe’s webpage instead of displaying the plugin. Firefox’s standard behaviour is to ask you to install it in an automated fashion. Just bad luck I happened to choose YouTube!)

This proved more problematic. Erin went to YouTube and searched for a Beatles video, and seemed to assume that it would work straight away. When it told her that she needed a plug-in she groaned, but clicked the link they gave her. It took her to the official Flash plug-in page, and gave her the option of downloading a gzipped tarball, an RPM or a YUM.

Because she’s using Ubuntu, the RPM and the YUM are going to be of no use – not that she knows this. Erin tried the .tar.gz, and it downloaded to her home folder. It opened in the archive manager, and she extracted it to the default. Then, she was lost. She tried double-clicking the file, and Ubuntu just asked her what she’d like to do with it. The option “run” results in it crashing. No clue was given to her that she should open up a terminal and type ‘./flashplayer-installer’. To be fair, there are links to installation instructions, but the average person acclimatised to Windows is not expecting to have to read complex information before installing a program – all they need to do is double click it. Obviously her attempts with the RPM and the YUM went nowhere. Frustrated, Erin conceded defeat.

There are other ways to install flash on Ubuntu, such as by using the inbuilt package manager. Why doesn’t Firefox tell her to do this, or do it automatically like Rhythmbox does with codecs? Ubuntu ship Firefox with their own special modifications, couldn’t this be one of them?

In general, this doesn’t seem to be an issue with the way Adobe handles installing the Flash player on Linux but how Firefox and YouTube do. I’m not sure we could do anything more on our Linux install page to help, but you have any ideas, I’m all ears.

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  • http://www.myad.com Jim

    Well, how about a .deb for Ubuntu users?

    Putting a link describing how to enable it in the repositories might be “better” but for somebody who’s just interested in playing youtube videos it might be a bit much.

    Just let them download it if they trust adobe.com and go from there.

    I LOVE the repositories and am reluctant to install anything that isn’t there. But if you have a program that can handle saying “hey, I’m out of date and there’s a new, more secure version available” then it seems OK.

  • http://janoserdelyi.com Janos Erdelyi

    Ryan,

    I agree that the process is a mess. Fixing it is another matter.

    While i do NOT feel that it should be up to adobe to be the holder of knowledge for various Linux distro installation particulars, Flash is their product and it is beneficial to make the installation process easier, so…

    On Flash download page, personally i’d lay out a series of recognizable major distribution icons – ubuntu, fedora, suse. There are others, but i would leave that with the tar.gz since pretty much anyone else would know what to do with that. Joe Average is not likely to be using Slackware or Gentoo, for example.

    The icons could lead to (or open up right there) with specific instructions for the distro in question. I’d guess that Ubuntu is the most needy, as general searches for basic linux operations has been clogged up with Ubuntu responses.

    So to reiterate – big clicky recognizable distribution-specific icons for more specific OS/distro instructions, while retaining the option to get tar.gz, RPM, or yum.

  • http://benfeldman.us/ Ben Feldman

    You should do something similar to what Skype does. Alongside offering the standard tarball, YUM and RPM packages, offer a .DEB as well.

    Point out which distributions use what — for example, under the Ubuntu logo have the link to download the .DEB. Under the SuSE/OpenSuSE logos, have the YUM package. Under the Red Hat/Fedora logos, have the RPM package. And then under the “Everything else” section, have the tarball available.

    Also, it would be great if you could try and detect through the user agent which distribution is being used. If the distribution is Debian, Ubuntu or an Ubuntu-derivative, perhaps make the Ubuntu section more prominent and maybe even start the download automatically. And do the same for Red Hat/Fedora and SuSE/OpenSuSE.

    If you can’t determine the distribution or the distribution isn’t one of the larger ones you automatically recognize, show the whole list and don’t start the download on the page load.

    Just my 2 cents – I know I would appreciate an updated Flash for Linux page, as well (even though I don’t need it). Also, if you do implement this, I’m sure everyone who uses Linux would love if you implemented a similar page for Adobe Reader for Linux, and, when you release it, AIR for Linux.

    Ben

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Hey guys, great feedback. I like the idea of different logos for different distros. That seems like it would be pretty straight forward and appeal to wide number of people.

    Thanks for taking the time to comment.

  • http://www.opesix.com/blogen Robbie van der Blom

    It would actually be good to provide either some specific pages which describe how they can install it from the repository for their specific distro.

    I wouldn’t just provide them with .deb .yum or .rpm because this would not provide them with the advantages that a repository provides, or adobe must be willing to start creating repositories for different distro’s which I wouldn’t recommend.

    Easiest of course is to have a discussion with some of the more popular distro’s to have it installed during setup or as one of the first questions when the system is started up.

    As an aside, this guy of course is actually not the smartest guy around, I’ve installed Ubuntu for my wife and I made absolutely sure that this kind of stuff was installed, because I want to make the experience as enjoyable as possible for her ;)

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    I’ve seen a couple of articles this week advising Ubuntu users how to get standard media extensions. (From what I understand they don’t include these in distributions because of our philosophical impurities.)

    It’d be nice if our installation & support pages pointed inquirers to their OS-specific resources, though.

    jd/adobe

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    Speaking of which, this thread just came up in other searches… Ubuntu forum discusses both getting the plugin, and dealing with website detection scripts. Two levels of problems.
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=774806

    jd/adobe