Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Installing/Upgrading flash on Ubuntu behind a proxy

This just refused to work because the flashplugin-installer that actually downloads the packet doesn't honor the http_proxy environment variable to I had to do a little hack to get this going. It's actually pretty simple: download the file and serve it from localhost so we don't need the proxy at all.

First shell:

  • mkdir /tmp/flash
  • cd /tmp/flash
  • wget http://archive.canonical.com/pool/partner/a/adobe-flashplugin/adobe-flashplugin_11.2.202.310.orig.tar.gz
    ==> or whatever version YOU need
  • python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80

Second shell:

  • unset http_proxy
  • vi /etc/hosts
    ==> add an entry so that "archive.canonical.com" points at 127.0.0.1 and save the file
  • aptitude install flashplugin-installer
  • vi /etc/hosts and remove the newly added entry

Stop the python http server and you're done.