Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Linux minefield and plugins

If you are as unfortunate as me and need to work with plugins (like Flash) running on a fresh build in Linux, this post could save you hours of frustrations. The problem is that the automatic plugin installer that comes with Minefield doesn't realize that it was built as opposed to being installed, and so when it fetches the required plugin it ends up installing it in the default location -- "/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins". Unfortunately this is not the location where Minefield looks for the plugin .so files. In order to actually install a plugin on Minefield you will need to first locate and then copy the .so file to Minefield's plugin directory -- "/mozilla/?ObjDir?/dist/bin/plugins". Then restart Minefield and you should be in business!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Actually, "/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins". *is* the location where Minefield (4.0b8 x64) looks for the plugin .so files.

iguess they changed it but lost an hour trying to find where. At near giving up, I linked the /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins location and restarted. Voila!
BTHOOM why they look in 32-bit lib location for 64-bit plugins... that is dumb, REALLY dumb.