One of the downsides of using 64-bit Linux (I use Kubuntu, a variant of Ubuntu) is that there hasn’t been a 64 bit Flash plugin. Sure, you could use a 32 bit browser, but that seems wrong. You could also use nswrapper to provide a 64 bit front end to a 32 bit plug in, but performance is not so good and it occasionally fails mysteriously.

I guess Adobe got tired of hearing folks whine, so they’ve released an alpha version of a 64 bit flash plugin. So far so good:

apt-get –purge remove nonfree-flashplugin nspluginwrapper
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
tar xvf libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
sudo mv libflashplayer.so .mozilla/plugins/

Restart Firefox and check the about:plugins page.

YouTube videos still play in squashed fullscreen if you have dual monitors but that’s not a 64 bit issue.

Enjoy! Now if only Sun would give us a good 64 bit Java plugin….