Managing installs of Adobe Flash on Debian (was: Force apt-get to ignore dependencies?)

[Benjamin Scott]

[revisiting an old issue]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 8:25 AM, Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Reading elsewhere, it would appear Canonical is hosting a repository
> for Adobe.

  I don't think this was ever really addressed on-list, so: I did find
the APT repository which contains Adobe's "free" Linux software.  The
sources.list directive would be of the form:

	deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ maverick partner

  Replace "maverick" with whatever Ubuntu release is most appropriate
for your situation.

  Unfortunately, the dependencies in that repo don't get along with my
Debian 5.0 "lenny" system.  APT claims the "adobe-flashplugin" package
requires versions of certain libraries lenny doesn't have.

  I can only assume the package is incorrectly using whatever library
versions were present on the Ubuntu system the package was built-on.
This is the usual behavior with the auto-dependency-generator tools
most packages are built with -- they assume you need what you happen
to have.  More accurate dependency info would require the programmer
to manually add some clue to the build, which practically never
happens.

  Certainly the Flash package I get from Adobe's manual download
site[1] installs and runs as well as Flash ever does.

[1] http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_10_linux.deb

-- Ben