Finally got around to downloading the Alpha of Adobe Flash Player 64-bit for Linux to try it out, and I have to say it feels good. My desktop box at home is no slouch, but clearly the old 32-bit wrapper and plugin combo was holding back Firefox badly – I notice it loads a little more snappily and heavy Flash-laden pages load much more smoothly and quickly.

Normally I wouldn’t endorse an Alpha to anyone but cutting-edge users, but I have to make an exception here. I’m going to keep using it until I come across a major show-stopper such as Firefox lockups or what-not.

If you’d like to try out the 64-bit plugin for yourself, here’s what you have to do.

First up, you need to be running Ubuntu 64-bit (duh), or any other 64-bit distro, but I’ll concentrate on Ubuntu here. This applies equally to Intrepid and Hardy installations, and should work for earlier ones too.

If you have the 32-bit wrapper and plugin installed, they need to be removed first. You can do that by jumping into a terminal and type:

$ sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree nspluginwrapper

Once that has finished, trot on over to Adobe’s Flash Player 10 site and download the 64-bit library (it’s not a proper .deb installer yet, just an archive). The link is at the bottom of the page. If you can’t see it, then click here for a direct link to the download.

Once it’s downloaded, extract the archive out. It contains only one file.

$ tar -xvf libflashplayer-10.0.d20.7.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
libflashplayer.so
$

…and now move it to the Mozilla plugins directory for Firefox to pick up:

$ sudo mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

That’s it! Now quit and restart Firefox. Go to about:plugins to verify that Firefox has indeed added the Flash Player 10 plugin, and then go and visit any website containing Flash content.

Enjoy!