Latest Flash Players do not work on RHEL 6 & 7, Centos 6 & 7, Scientific Linux 6 & 7, etc

[mark.crossland]

It appears that the latest builds of the flash-plugin package DOES NOT WORK for:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & 7
• CentOS 6 & 7
• Scientific Linux 6 & 7
• Oracle Linux 6 & 7

The reason for this appears to be because they have been compiled with a version of GLIBC that is not available on these systems. The packages install, but do not show or work in Firefox. When looking into the reason why, we get the following:

```

# ldd /usr/lib64/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib64/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so: /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.21' not found (required by /usr/lib64/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so)
```

RHEL7 supports up to GLIBCXX_3.4.19

RHEL6 supports up to GLIBCXX_3.4.13

Newer versions than these are not available.

Affected versions of the flash plugin are:

32.0.0.293

32.0.0.303

This is also mentioned at:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/flash-player/32-0-0-293-no-longer-works-on-red-hat-enterprise-linux-6...

It is  also logged as a bug at https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/FP-4199058,but no-one from Adobe  appears to have taken a look at it.

[_maria_]

For security reasons, Flash Player for Linux has been compiled with updated library dependencies. Please refer to the bottom of https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/release-note/readme-flash-player-linux.html for a list of library dependencies. To continue using Flash Player on Linux requires updating to a distro that supports these libraries.

[mark.crossland]

"Upgrading to a more recent distribution" is not a viable solution, especially as RHEL7 support continues until 2024. We have roughly 800 RHEL7 Linux desktops. In order to upgrade these to RHEL8 would take in excess of a year and require substantial effort at which point Adobe Flash is end of life.

edit: I should add that I'm not asking for Flash to still work until 2024, but I do expect Flash to work until it's proposed retirement date in 2020. Rather than becoming "unsupported" with no advance warning.

[incident41]

I think dropping support for long-term enterprise releases, without any advance warning as Mark C stated (in fact it was notified after-the-fact and by users, not by Adobe) "for security reasons" is something that should never, ever be on the table at any time - moreso when the surprise breakage happens while at the same time pulling older-but-working releases of the Flash plugin.

Let me hence be very skeptical of such a statement, because it would expose a level of naivete in planning long-term support that is even worse than the blunder of breaking working setups in an irreversible fashion.

Allow me to suggest Adobe considers one of:

1. (ugly bandaid) make .270 available again for download for users who have been suddenly left without options and notify Mozilla (and possibly other users of the NPAPI interface) about NOT blacklisting .270 until 2020 is over

2. (actual solution) review with absolute care what's in newer GLIBC that you positively, absolutely need and find a way to obtain the same results using available hooks in older GLIBC, then recompile and let long-term support users enjoy their Flash plugin in 2020

3. (if #2 is truly unachievable, which I doubt, but for the sake of discussion) make a specific long-term support Flash plugin available with every new security fix except the impossible-to-obtain-without-newer-GLIBC and stick a big fat warning to those who want to download such package that they do so at their own risk

4. (if none of the above, or anything else useful is available) place a heartfelt apology in Adobe's main page for breaking without any advance warning long-term support Linux distros, and say that Adobe was not serious when mentioning Flash plugin support through 2020, thank you very much

[Robert Mc Dowell]

5. Develop a special long term browser to allow old and new technologies together.

[_maria_]

There are duplicate posts for this issue which results in the related comments posted to multiple locations, therefore, to keep comments in one location, locking this as a duplicate of https://community.adobe.com/t5/flash-player/32-0-0-293-on-firefox-70-0-1-under-centos-7-7/td-p/10756...

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Issue is also being tracked at https://tracker.adobe.com/#/view/FP-4199058