32 bit Flash on 64 bit Linux

I am running some 64 bit version of CentOS and was quite happy for a while with the 64 bit alpha Flash plugin Adobe made available in their labs for some time. Hulu changed from working to non-working, etc. but other sites like ComedyCentral were happy.

Anyway, last week Adobe pulled the 64 bit version of Flash and so I decided in order to get a better Flash experience to install the 32 bit Flash.

I spent about two days on and off playing with the various settings of nspluginwrapper which gave me Flash without sound, Flash which crashed, Flash... but it never worked right. This morning I decided to just remove the 64 bit Firefox and install the 32 bit one instead, added Flash and everything worked as expected.

There are some tricks so just follow those steps:

1. Add adobe repository to yum (see here - step 2)
2. Add the 32 bit repo to yum (see here - step 4 b)
3. Remove firefox - yum remove firefox
4. and remove flash, nsplugin if installed previously
5. Add i386 versions of everything: yum install firefox.i386 flash-plugin.i386 alsa-utils.i386
6. Try it out
7. If it doesn't work follow the tip here and remove and install alsa libs again.

Hope that makes your flash work...