Using the find command to install flashplayer

[blackbelt_jones]

I got this in my private box. I'm replying publically -- in part cause it turns out there's a limit for how long private messages can be.

blackbelt jones how u doing you dont know me but u were online at the time an i wanted to see if you can offer me some advice on installing a flashplayer on ydl v5.0 for the ps3 platform please if u can offer me any advice it would be most thankful

Well, I don't know anything about ps3 or yellow dog, so I'm just going to assume that we're talking about a computer, and all my experience isn't useless.

Of the three options for installing flash found here:

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/downl...ShockwaveFlash

Option one ( the tarball, the installion shell script) is the one that should work on any x-enabled Linux system that I am familiar with. Option one was always hard for me because I never knew what to answer when the installer prompted me for the browser "installation path"

Then I discovered the find command. Here's how I do it.

Login as root in the shell

type:

cd /

That'll put you in the root directory, sitting right in the center, on top of everything. (Sort of a mixed metaphor, I know) When you use the command from here, it'll search the entire system. You want to use it as root so that no part of the system will be denied access to "find".

Now the command. Type:

find -name *mozilla* -print

it may take a few minutes, but the shell will list every file in the system with "mozilla" somewhere in the path, and one of those will be the "installation path" that the installer asks you for, for firefox or seamonkey or whatever. If it's not the first one you try, you can just try another.

with the information, you can go ahead and use the tarball installer (option one) pretty easy.

unzip the tarball, cd to the directory, login as root, and type:

sh flashplayer-installer

With the "find" command, you should have all the information you need to follow the prompts without any trouble.

Hold the phone!

instead of

find -name *mozilla* -print

first try:

find -name *mozilla*sh -print

cause I think the installation path directory should contain an installation script. The first command produced an output of a page and a half on my system. The second command produced this:

/usr/lib/thunderbird-2.0.0.4/run-mozilla.sh
/usr/lib/seamonkey-1.1.2/run-mozilla.sh
/usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.4/run-mozilla.sh

I've already installed flashplayer on this system, so I can't be test it to be certain, but I think these are the installtion scripts of all three of my mozilla based browsers.

So the installation paths would simply be the directories those scripts inhabit:

./usr/lib/thunderbird-2.0.0.4/
./usr/lib/seamonkey-1.1.2/
./usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.4/

Hope that's helpful. I know it was long.

One more thing. Most people use the find command like this:

find / -name *mozilla*sh -print

Or do they? I kept running into problems with it, so maybe I was doing it wrong. The "/" after "find" supposedly means that you're searching the whole root directory, but sometimes it would work for me and other times I'd get an unaccountable error message. For the life of me I don't know what I was doing differently, but I discovered that by cd-ing to / and making the command from there, I could end all that nonsense.

[saikee]

Must admit I am one of the "most people" who search by the command

find / -name *mozilla*sh -print

[blackbelt_jones]

Must admit I am one of the "most people" who search by the command

find / -name *mozilla*sh -print

Most people are. Can you have any idea why this didn't work for me about a third of the time? I'd get an error message saying, in effect: "You need to start with the path!", and I'd be like: "I am starting with the path, you silly command interpreter!", and then I'd carefully look at what I'd just typed, not see anything different form the times when it had worked, try it again, and still it wouldn't work.

Logically, the problem must have been located, as they say, "somewhere between the keyboard and the chair"... but if there's nothing wrong with the command as printed above, I am truly stumped by this one. Fortunately, I found a way that works for me one hundred per cent of the time.

[saikee]

Couldn't answer your question.

It take too long to try "find" and "find /" in my PC because it has 2 500Gb hard disk each with 12 partitions. I gave up after the search reported the first 10 partitions and showed no difference between the two in my machine.

[loopback48]

This is a very good example of why one should use Debian. I HATE tarballs! Don't know why, but I do. Some just love them. But not me.

I'll wait for a month for an app to become available in a Debian repository before I'll use one of those dirty little tarballs!

"Tarball?; I don't need to show you no stinking tarball!"

[deathadder]

find / -name *mozilla*sh -print

Unless I'm mistaken, *mozilla* will always expand to include any kind of 'extension', as in sh, because '*' is a wild card that the shell expands to including any number of characters.

However, including *mozilla*sh tells the shell to match any file that has mozilla in the name anywhere AND sh at the end of the name. Granted it's what you want in this case, but unless I've read something wrong, that's not what your point was...

As for why your find some times complains about the path, I'm not sure I've ran into it a few times myself.

[blackbelt_jones]

This is a very good example of why one should use Debian. I HATE tarballs! Don't know why, but I do. Some just love them. But not me.

I'll wait for a month for an app to become available in a Debian repository before I'll use one of those dirty little tarballs!

"Tarball?; I don't need to show you no stinking tarball!"

It's not a source tarball, at least as far as I know. It doesn't need to be compiled. It's just a generic binary package bundled up with an installer script. And, sorry, but you are going to need it, at least if you want to install this particular version of flashplayer on debian. It's not free software, so it's never going to be in the Debian repository, and the publisher (Adobe, if memory serves) isn't making a .deb package available.

[blackbelt_jones]

Unless I'm mistaken, *mozilla* will always expand to include any kind of 'extension', as in sh, because '*' is a wild card that the shell expands to including any number of characters.

However, including *mozilla*sh tells the shell to match any file that has mozilla in the name anywhere AND sh at the end of the name. Granted it's what you want in this case, but unless I've read something wrong, that's not what your point was...

Well, the point was to make it easier to find the right path by generating a shorter, more specific list, instead of a page and a half. However, I happened to install flashplayer on my other machine today, and it no longer looks like *mozilla*sh is necessarily going to generate the right answer. It works for slackware (maybe; that's how I seem to remember it)... but not for debian. There's no reason to believe that it will work for ydl or any other distro. So never mind. Go with *mozilla* and if that doesn't work try *firefox*, etc. In my experience, it seems to me that the right answer usually begins with /usr/lib/. Remember that you're looking for a path to a directory, not to a file.

[deathadder]

It's not a source tarball, at least as far as I know.

Yeah your right, the installer simply copies files to the right folders, now if only Adobe would get round to making a x86_64 version!

Debian does package flash as, flashplugin-nonfree. But I would guess the package will be a little bit behind new releases from Adobe. Which is nothing huge to worry about since it takes Adobe ages to release anything for Linux anyway

Ah, sorry I missed your point, it had been a long day of studying, so I should have double read the post...sorry for any confusion.

[blackbelt_jones]

Ah, sorry I missed your point, it had been a long day of studying, so I should have double read the post...sorry for any confusion.

Well, it's more important to pay attentiion to me on those rare occasions when I am not wrong about something. As noted above, this was not one of those occasions.

[ArtVandelay]

I have also experienced the weird problem
with find sometimes working and sometimes not
when you do it in the usual way.

A typical one for me is
find . -iname "prefix*"

Now I know to just leave that dot alone!

[retsaw]

I would use locate rather than find here (e.g. "locate mozilla.sh") to save time. The caveat to using using locate is that you must have a locate database already created and it must have been updated since the file you are looking for was installed (this is done using updatedb which is typically set up to run as a cron job on most Linux distros). And you can always fall back to using find if locate doesn't find what you want.