One of Mac's slogans is "it just works". Well, this week I've found an exception to that. It was all running just fine, then I decided to upgrade to Macromedia/Adobe Flash 9 on my new(ish) MacBook. The installation appears to have worked just fine. but when I tun on my browser, it's obvious that it failed, as the 'missing plugin' notification appears – both in FireFox and in Safari.
I tried down-grading to Flash 8, that didn't work. I tried the fixes on various forums, they were no good. Finally I stumbled across a fix in VersionTracker. It turns out that the Flash installer is not using super user privileges, therefore it can't write to the /Library/Internet Plugins directory. I also found this hack to make it work (you should know a little about unix shell commands):
This is what i did:
1. Open Terminal.app
2. Type:
cd "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/"
3. Look at the owner of the Internet Plug-Ins directory by typing:
ls -la | grep " .$"
4. In the command result is the owner name, remember it
drwxr-xr-x 31 OWNERNAME admin 1054 Feb 25 10:54 .
5. Change the owner temporarily to your user name:
sudo chown MYUSERNAME .
6. Remove old flash installation files:
rm -rf flashplayer.xpt
rm -rf "Flash Player.plugin"
rm -rf "Flash Player Enabler.plugin"
7. Launch the Macromedia installer (yet again)
8. Change back the owner of the directory:
sudo chown OWNERNAME .
Just as the original poster, I take NO RESPONSIBILITY if you made mistakes and something screws up.
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