Smoothwall Firewall project

Wednesday 12 March 2014

Setting up Adobe Flash with Wine and Windows Firefox on Linux - all to get VMware vSphere working in a browser






As I regularly need to use vmware software for a lot of cloud implementations , it has become more of a pain to keep switching to a virtual machine just to allow me to use a later version of Flash, that Adobe no longer supports in Linux. This is because VMware in their wisdom have decided that the web version of vSPhere management will only work with Flash version 11.5 and above.

So I decide today to do something about it, and make it easier.

Here are the steps to get it working.

1) Install wine from your Distros repos - or download the latest from WineHQ

2) If you are behind a proxy make sure you have http_proxy set - if this doesn't work then use this util to set the proxy in Wine - Proxycfg.exe - links at bottom
e.g. wine Proxycfg.exe -p http://myproxy-server.co.uk:8080

3) Download and install a Windows version of Firefox from the link below
e.g. chmod u+x Firefox Setup 27.0.1.exe ; wine  Firefox Setup 27.0.1.exe

4) Download the version of Adobe flash I point to in the links - don't go to the Adobe page it doesn't work for me.

5) Run the command "wine install_adobe_flash_11_plugin.exe" and just follow the instructions.

6) Start up firefox with wine, and heh presto you can now connect to the vSphere console, and go to other Adobe sites if you like.

Hope this saves people time when trying to do the same.

Latest stable Windows version of Firefox

Copy of the Proxycfg.exe file for configuring wines proxy settings

The version of Adobe Flash I found to work with Ubuntu 12.04 - wine version 1.4

Wine help on how to use Proxycfg.exe - search page for proxy