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I'm having problems with Flash under ubuntu and was going to try and upgrade to the Alpha release of Flash 10.1.

The problem is that it came as a .so file, and I can't find any information as to what this is.

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Other poster have already answered your question, so no point for me to add another substantially identical text. I attract your attention on this bug though (bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/…) as maybe your symptoms are similar and you would like to take a look in there. – mac Nov 17 '09 at 0:03
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Almost forgot: in the bug description linked above, there is also a workaround that solves the problem (comment #16). Best of luck! – mac Nov 17 '09 at 0:04
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An .so file is a compiled library file. It stands for "Shared Object" and is analogous to a Windows DLL.

Often, package files will place these under /lib or /usr/lib or some place similar when they're installed. If you extract an .so file to a location in your $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, a program that requires the library should be able to use it.

Ideally, read the accompanying documentation to ensure that it's in the right location.

If you run a command like locate adobe-flashplugin from the Terminal you may see some existing similarly-named libraries.

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Unless Ubuntu does things completely differently from other Linux dynamic linkers, the dynamic linker does not search the path ($PATH), but rather searches a fixed set of paths as well as the directories specified in $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. See the man pages for ld.so and ldconfig for more details. – Chris Cleeland Nov 16 '09 at 22:34
That sounds right -- thanks... $LD_LIBRARY_PATH not $PATH. :-) – Andrew Flanagan Nov 16 '09 at 23:19
/usr/lib and /lib are much more common than /var/lib. Actually, it's pretty rare to put a library in /var/lib. – qedi Nov 16 '09 at 23:54
Sorry -- was in a rush. :-) I'll correct it... – Andrew Flanagan Nov 17 '09 at 2:05
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up vote 2 down vote

It is a dynamically linked shared object library, analogous to a .dll file in Windows.

Here are a couple of posts for installing Flash 10 in Ubuntu x64 and x86:

Make sure you've uninstalled any previous versions of Flash befor installing 10.

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