Knowledge Base

Flash 7, as of 2005 is also not working properly with firefox, and will actually crash it. The mplayerplug-in port (in /usr/ports/www/mplayerplug-in) will play many, but not all, realplayer and quicktime files.

However, for the moment, I'll leave the instructions, written back when everything was working, in place. Hopefully, the various broken ports will eventually be fixed for those who prefer using ports.

The beginner, however, will probably be better off simply downloading and installing the pbi's for firefox, Linux_Compat and flash 6.

Step one, install firefox. The easiest way to do this is by using the pbi package.

Next, you have to install the ports collection. As root or with root-privilege, cd to root's home directory and run

cvsup ports-supfile

This will take quite awhile the first time.

With PCBSD-1.0-rc1, many people prefer to use portsnap, which is now part of the base system. In this case, the commands would be

portsnap fetch
portsnap extract

This will download the ports collection and put it in /usr/ports. The extract command will take quite awhile. However, once it's done, the next time one can simply type

portsnap fetch
portsnap update

It is much faster than cvsup-ing the ports collection each time.

Once the ports tree has been installed, the next step is to install the linuxpluginwrapper port.

cd /usr/ports/www/linuxpluginwrapper
make install clean

The installation from ports will take awhile. As well as the linuxpluginwrapper itself, the port also installs acroread7, realplayer, and a few other things. Upon completion of installation, there will be a message telling you that you have to edit your libmap.conf file.
If you miss that message (and this holds for any port) you can always view it again by typing

pkg_info -Dx linuxpluginwrapper

The simplest thing to do is to copy over the example libmap.conf that the port supplies.

cp /usr/local/share/examples/linuxpluginwrapper/libmap.conf-FreeBSD5-stable /etc/libmap.conf

(If your browser broke that, it should be on one line)
Restart firefox and in the address bar type

about:plugins

You should see flash, realplayer and acrobat listed