How To[AMD64]: 32bit Firefox and Flash, without the Chroot

[RAOF]

For me the most annoying problem in 64bit Breezy is the lack of a 64bit flash plugin (a small gripe, true, but without flash there is no Homestar Runner!). However, after a bit of mucking around, and some help from other forumgoers (particularly Tux61), even this small gripe is now forever banished.

Update: now on the Ubuntu wiki, with bonus java plugin!
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirefoxAMD64FlashJava

To get a working 32bit firefox, you can follow these steps:
1) Download a 32bit binary version of firefox from mozilla.org. I used the 1.5RC2 build here. You should be able to use any i386/i686 build, but I haven't tested anything else.

2) Unpack the .tar.gz file to your favourite program-installation-directory. I use a Programs directory under my home directory. Installing firefox here means I have write privileges, so the automatic update works. For people who have multiple users on their system, somewhere like /usr/local or /opt is probably a better choice.

3) Get the ia32 libs, and linux32 so we can fool firefox into downloading 32bit plugins.

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk linux32

4) Create a /etc/pango32/pangorc file:

sudo gedit /etc/pango32/pangorc

and fill it with this:

[Pango]
ModuleFiles=/etc/pango32/pango.modules
[PangoX]
AliasFiles=/etc/pango/pangox.aliases

5) Create a firefox32 shell script

sudo gedit /usr/local/bin/firefox32

and fill it with this:

#!/bin/sh
export GTK_PATH=/usr/lib32/gtk-2.0
export PANGO_RC_FILE=/etc/pango32/pangorc
linux32 /path/to/firefox/firefox $@

And finally, make it executable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/firefox32

6) Watch your friends be amazed!

You can now edit your firefox launcher(s) to launch firefox32, rather than firefox. This will use your old firefox profile, and it seems that the Ubuntu packaged firefox & the new 1.5RC2 don't tread on each other's config too badly. The exception being that I got a thick grey bar at the bottom of the Ubuntu firefox window after running the RC2.

To get flash working, just browse to a site using flash (once again, I suggest Homestar Runner ) - you can now just install the plugin normally though firefox!

Problems:
When I first installed flash, it sort of worked, and sound played, but where the visuals should have been was blank. It turns out that this was due to my previous efforts to install flash. Renaming the ~/.mozilla directory to something else, installing flash, and then copying my bookmarks etc into the new .mozilla directory fixed it. You should be able to get away with just deleting the .mozilla/plugins directory, and possibly the ./mozilla/pluginreg.dat, but I didn't try that.

Flash sometimes doesn't have sound. I think that this is due to something else locking the soundcard, but I haven't followed it up at all. I suspect that following some of the instructions littering this board about flash and sound should fix it