If, like me, you’ve been struggling to install the Macromedia Flash plug-in for Firefox on a Linux machine (in my case it was Fedora Core 5), then you may find item 12 on the Macromedia Flash Player 7 for x86 Linux frequently asked questions useful.

For weeks now, every time I’ve accessed a page containing Flash content (like this blog, for example) Firefox has seemingly downloaded and installed the missing plug-ins but the changes haven’t been accepted. After starting a terminal session and elevating my permissions to root (su -), creating a file called /etc/yum.repos.d/macromedia-i386.repo with the following contents:

[macromedia]
name=Macromedia for i386 Linux
baseurl=http://macromedia.rediris.es/rpm/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://macromedia.mplug.org/FEDORA-GPG-KEY

and executing the command:

yum install flash-plugin

the Flash plug-in was installed, although it also needed a browser reset before the changes took effect.

(Now all I need to do is get the Java runtime environment to load…)