Supporting essential applications for linux desktop

Hi there, nowadays we see lot of linux installations coming up in our organization, paving a big way to replacing the old OS's and the issues in them too seem to multiply.Along with the installation, we too have to support the applications in it installed for developers.A common issue we faced was the installation of firefox and adobe reader which is not natively available with the enterprise version of linux OS we are using.So, solution we have now come up with is :

i) Repository of such softwares which need frequent installations for developers to be hosted in our machines which act as FTP server.

ii) The repositories are in a common folder and needs admin-level access so that only we are authorized for copying using SFTP.

iii) Packages are divided into developer tools, utilities, and other folders for ease of access

Also, i am outlining a solution for installing flashplayer plugin for Firefox which is a common problem in all the machines which have installed Firefox.If you view flash charts or view flash animations in your firefox browser in linux, go for the following steps:

1. wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
2. tar -zxf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
3. mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins/
4. mv install_flash_player_9_linux/flashplayer.xpt install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/
5. nspluginwrapper -i ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
6. close all firefox instances and restart iceweasel/firefox/whatever

NB: Be sure to check nspluginwrapper installed before trying out this. Also, your machine must be exposed to outside network without a proxy so that wget works for download of the plugin package.Otherwise, go for http download by googling the appropriate package for your flavour of linux.

I tried the above steps in a both ubuntu desktop at my home and RHEL4 AS version at the workplace but can work in most linux installations.Since the workplace machines are in an isolated network, i had to use the already downloaded packages in the FTP server repository.

Happy browsing :)