Tips: Firefox on Linux

Some minor annoyances and their fixes

• OS: Linux / Fedora Release12 / 64-bit
• Browser: Firefox 3.5.8

Installing the Flash Player plugin

The Firefox browser included with Fedora 12 did not have the Flash Player plugin. This is probably because the 64-bit Linux version was still in alpha (as of this writing). Anyway, most of the information online for installation on Linux points to Mozilla directories that seem like the correct one, but really aren't (/usr/lib/mozilla, /usr/lib64/mozilla etc.). I should've been looking at the appropriate Firefox directory (d-uh). The lib vs lib64 thing also threw me off a bit.

Anyway, this is what worked for me:

1. Download the 64-bit Flash Player plugin for Linux. I found it at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html. It should be packaged as a .tar.gz archive. Untar it and find the file called libflashplayer.so
2. Copy libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib64/firefox-3.5.8/plugins (Replace firefox-3.5.8 with whatever your Firefox directory is)
3. Restart Firefox and browse to any flash-enabled website.

If the plugins directory does not exist, create it.

Removing/Uninstalling Language packs

Firefox also includes a variety of language packs which I'm sure are useful for some people that speak Armenian, Greek, Slovenian and Tamil - but for the rest of us probably a big NOT. I wanted to get all the unnecessary packs out of the browser, but Firefox only allowed me to disable them through it's Tools > Add-ons > Languages option. The "Uninstall" option was always greyed out.

I realized that you need to be a superuser for this. So....

• Open a terminal window from Linux: Navigate to Applications > System Tools > Terminal (or any of the other 4 billion ways you can get a terminal window in Linux!)
• Switch to the root account: Type su at the prompt and enter the password for root when prompted.
• Start Firefox: Just type firefox at the prompt and it should start it up as the root account.
• From the Firefox menu, navigate to Tools > Add-ons > Languages and start uninstalling all the packs you don't need.