upgrading flash player

[arline]

I'm Extremely low-tech. I want to upgrade flash player (from 9 to 10) and need how-to in plain english. I have an asus eee-pc 4g/surf and several pages of notes and instructions but no matter what I do I can't seem to make it work.
thanks for any sugestions.

[whych]

What distro are you using?
Most distros have an updat e option that will update for your installation.
Failing this, update it directly from the adobe.com site.

[reed9]

I will assume since you mentioned being low-tech that you have not installed a new operating system on your eee pc. Which means you are using the default Xandros install.

Xandros is based on an old version of Debian Linux. (Which probably doesn't mean much to you now, but for your information and because it may come up if you post in the future.)

Unfortunately, this means that it uses some pretty old software, which makes updating programs problematic at times.

I don't run Xandros at all, but this guide should so far as I know work. (And upgrade to Firefox 3 while we're at it.)
My EeePC Blog: Install Firefox 3 with flashplayer 10 on my EeePC 4G

To summarize:
Press CTRL+ALT+T to open a terminal.

Copy and past this in the terminal

echo "deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/1.6/ common main" | sudo tee -a /etc/sources.list

It will ask for your user password, enter that.

Then do

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firefox-upgrade

The downside to this is that it will remove VLC and some other stuff in the process.

[arline]

thank you. even though I don't unerstand a lot of what you say, the steps you outline sound like something I can do. I'll have to wait till later in the day to try it and see.
thanks again.

[arline]

see, that is part of the problem - I don't know what "distro" means - someone else asked me so I looked it up and I still don't understand. however, I did go to adobe's site and downloaded the .tar.gz and the .rpm versions (not the YUM) but then I was told I had to "unpack" and I don't know that either. ASUS tech support on the phone was worthless and adobe tech support on the phone gave me wrong info.

[reed9]

Distro is short for distribution. Which is basically a bundle of software running on top of the linux kernel.

The kernel of the operating system is the core bit of software that deals with the hardware of your computer. It's the go between from all the normal applications we run, office software, web browser, whatever, and the hardware, ie, processor, memory, devices.

The operating system as we usually think of it, the file manager, the program that draws and moves windows on the screen, all of that stuff, can vary greatly. There's lots of different file managers, window managers, web browsers, etc. The distribution is basically the collection of all this software. The people who create distros put it all together, maintain it, make sure everything works together, configure things in different ways.

Now, there are a bunch of common things that many programs all have to do, basic tasks. For efficiency, these common tasks are bundled up into libraries. Different programs can all share the use of these libraries, rather than having a redundant system where every program has to include their own version of these common tasks. But, this gives rise to a complex software ecosystem, where you have to make sure all the programs available for the distro, and this can run into the tens of thousands, are compatible with each other and these libraries. This is a big part of what a distro does.

The pertinent part here is this. Flash 10 depends on a newer version of a library called glibc (GNU C Library) than what the default operating system of your eee pc has. What this means is that you can't just take the tarred flash player off the Adobe site, unpack it, and go. It won't work. You need to upgrade glibc first.

Now, all distros have a collection of software they maintain, called repositories. The repositories contain the whole ecosystem of software for that distro. To upgrade a low level library like glibc might require changing many of these software packages to ensure compatibility, which is a lot of work and can potentially break the system.

How this pans out in practice is, each new "release" of a distro is all of these bits of software upgraded, tested, reconfigured and then put out there for use. Within any given release, distros will not usually upgrade any of the software beyond security fixes.

With the instructions I gave above, what you're doing is adding a new online repository of software. That's this bit

echo "deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/1.6/ common main" | sudo tee -a /etc/sources.list

Which adds a line to the file /etc/sources.list reading deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/1.6/ common main. You can see this is pointing to a url.

Then you sync up the info on your computer with that from the online repo with apt-get update, then install this bundled upgrade for firefox, which included Flash Player 10 and the upgraded glibc.

The package manager, APT, is able to read meta-data from the software packages, which list all the various things the software depends on to run, and will pull in and install those other bits of software as well. This info all lets the package manager know if there is going to be a conflict that might break things, and tries to resolve this, either by refusing to install, or removing the conflicting packages.

[aetiv]

That is a very good explanation reed9.

[arline]

wow - this is great - real english I can understand! many thanks and I will get to it right away. I have a friend who is linux-ignorant but otherwise computer savvy and he should be able to take it from here if I's still confused.