[CLOSED] Great OS, but need Flash

Wow, Zorin OS is almost perfect "out of the box" with the Win7 desktop, and after the 7th distro try, that was quite a relief. All I had to do was step through the preferences, make my selections, load Opera and I am ready to go (almost - I need flash).

It's clean, bright and beautiful, and light enough to give almost 3 hours use on my laptop unplugged (I didn't even get an hour with LM18, I had 4 under Win7). Kudos to the development team - it's just what I need to leave MSW behind. The flat designs and contrasts are easier for my retina damaged eyes to read|see. It's not too difficult to find what I want, due to the Win7 like menu layout, much better than any other distro I tried.

There is one major issue:
Unable to get Adobe Flash Player installed. I downloaded "flash_player_ppapi_linux.i386.tar.gz" from Adobe's website, which gave me "libpepflashplayer.so" after extracting... now I need help.

And just a couple of minor issues:
Date|Time, does it only show Day|H:MM, no Month|Date? Can't be changed?
Is something like "Show desktop" possible on task bar|panel?
(I did have some "freezing" and rebooting while hunting for flash options, sent error files as requested)

I would appreciate help, mainly getting Flash installed.

My system details:
Dell Vostro-V13
Intel® CPU U7300 @ 1.30GHz × 2
Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset x86/MMX/SSE2
Zorin OS 12 32-bit
312.8 GB

Hi! I agree with what you said about Zorin OS 12!

I just wanted to give you a little FYI however, that is that Adobe Flash is outdated and has been abandoned by the whole internet. HTML5 has since taken over, which is built into all modern browsers such as Firefox, Chromium, Google Chrome. The only issue I personally had is that I couldn't get Netflix to work with Chromium or Firefox, due to my OS being a linux distro. However, that was quickly solved by downloading Google Chrome, which has support for Netflix built in, which solved my issues.

Regarding the clock, I too had an issue with it serving military 24 hour clock cycle time by default. If you access your settings, you will find a link in there to change the clock and date, which I suggest you do. Hope this helps.

Be aware that Zorin from an early stage has always had Kodi (formerly xbmc) as an alternative DE

star treker wrote:Hi! I agree with what you said about Zorin OS 12!

I just wanted to give you a little FYI however, that is that Adobe Flash is outdated and has been abandoned by the whole internet. HTML5 has since taken over, which is built into all modern browsers such as Firefox, Chromium, Google Chrome. The only issue I personally had is that I couldn't get Netflix to work with Chromium or Firefox, due to my OS being a linux distro. However, that was quickly solved by downloading Google Chrome, which has support for Netflix built in, which solved my issues.

Regarding the clock, I too had an issue with it serving military 24 hour clock cycle time by default. If you access your settings, you will find a link in there to change the clock and date, which I suggest you do. Hope this helps.

Swarfendor437 wrote:Be aware that Zorin from an early stage has always had Kodi (formerly xbmc) as an alternative DE

Thank you for your replies.

First the clock: I had already found and changed the time to AM/PM, it's the month and day I was hoping to display.

More importantly regarding Flash: I stopped use of Google, Chrome & Firefox 2 years ago. I don't want to use them. I prefer Opera & DuckDuckGo. I tried Chromium and Midori since switching to Linux, they would be OK except they are not supported by my password manager (which I really like), Opera (which I also really like) is supported. On Dec 6 my email which I access by webmail will be updating to a new format for which Flash will be required. I just spoke to them on the phone. Any video we try to watch also tells us Flash is required. These are just short videos, we cannot stream TV shows or movies on our budget. Our only option for internet in the rural area we live in is mobile broadband through Verizon. Since we purchase the data, things like Netflix and streaming movies are out of the question. I researched the Flash issue and this is from August 2016: https://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/201 ... OaJVm.dpbs
Linux Mint 18 has Flash, aren't Zorin and LM both based on Ubuntu? So shouldn't I be able to use it on Zorin? I just need help getting it installed from that "unpacked" file. Installations are not simple like they were in MSW.

LM was sort of ok, but very s-l-o-w. I could count to one-thousand-four very slowly while waiting on a response from a click - and there was no double click - I hope I don't need to go back to that. I like everything about Zorin, except I need Flash.

I would appreciate any help with installing Flash.
And possibly a show desktop for the task bar?

Hi, Regarding flash, it does not always work but alongside Firefox, I have Opera 12.16 and the following extensions installed:

Media Plus, No click to activate - give those a try and see if it helps.

Regarding show desktop, I think you may have to install Cairo-Dock DE and boot into that instead of the Zorin DE:

download/file.php?id=3356&mode=view

Swarfendor437 wrote:Hi, Regarding flash, it does not always work but alongside Firefox, I have Opera 12.16 and the following extensions installed:

Media Plus, No click to activate - give those a try and see if it helps.

Regarding show desktop, I think you may have to install Cairo-Dock DE and boot into that instead of the Zorin DE:

download/file.php?id=3356&mode=view

Thank you. I added Media Plus to Opera, I returned to 2 of the sites and they still say Flash required. I probably will need to start looking at other distros again, very SAD because I really like Zorin, but not enough to use Google/Chrome/Firefox.

Did you downgrade your Opera to 12.16? That is what I am using and the extensions work.

Swarfendor437 wrote:Did you downgrade your Opera to 12.16? That is what I am using and the extensions work.

I admit, I didn't get that I was to do that at first, I like the newer version of Opera, but I will try downgrading if I need too to stay with Zorin. (I am a little concerned about security in an older version.)

I did try downloading it, but it said "no file found". So, I am continuing to work through several tutorials I found trying to get it installed myself. It's funny, so many of them assume things, like "in terminal, navigate to the file location and execute a particular command", they may give you the command to type, but don't tell you how to get to the file, when you're new to Linux, it is VERY different from the MSW file structure. I am trying to use tutorials and DuckIt for answers, but it gets a little daunting.

Do you know, if I purchased the Ultimate version, would one of the developers then give me explicit text to put in terminal to make flash work? I wouldn't have a problem with that.

Thank you for your attempts to help.

Also, I found "show desktop", sort of, if I use the windows button (or Activities Overview from the menu), I can select the desktop from a panel on the right, works well.

Here you go:

http://www.opera.com/download/guide/?os ... 4&list=all

Swarfendor437 wrote:Here you go:

http://www.opera.com/download/guide/?os ... 4&list=all

This downloaded a 64bit file, so it didn't work. I kept searching and trying other files, I'm giving up on Opera. Sad to leave it behind, it has been my favorite browser for years, but even though a lot of people say Flash is "done", it still is being used in things I'm using, so I am overlooking my objections to using Firefox (since it has built in flash) so that I can function in Zorin OS. I don't feel like I need to look at any more distros, the more I have used this the more I like it.

I'd like to document here what I was told to do to get Flash installed, in case anyone else is searching for solutions. These did not work for me, but perhaps they would for someone else:

Option 1: In order to install and make sure that you're using the latest version of Flash player in Zorin OS 12 (across all browsers), please press Ctrl+Alt+T and enter the following command: *sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree*

Option 2: Open the Zorin menu > search & open "Software & Updates" > Other Software
Check the box beside "Canonical Partners"
Close the window and select to "Reload" the sources when prompted
Press Ctrl+Alt+T to open the Terminal and enter this command: *sudo apt-get
install flashplugin-installer*
After restarting your browser, you should be able to view Flash content.

Thank you for your attempts to help me find a solution.

OK, will mark this thread as [CLOSED] rather than [SOLVED]?

Swarfendor437 wrote:OK, will mark this thread as [CLOSED] rather than [SOLVED]?

Yes, thanks.