How to use rpm to install adobe-flash?

[Joel Rees]

If I hadn't been fighting with grub for five days straight (and still
losing), I'd have been able to add my two cents when it might have
still mattered. (sigh)

On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Varuna Seneviratna
<varunaseneviratna at gmail.com> wrote:
> When executed the command
>
> rpm -i adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
> The feedback is, Eerror: can't create transaction lock on
> /var/lib/rpm/.rpm.lock (Permission denied)
>
>
> What is the Solution and what is meant by?
> can't create transaction lock

Theoretically, a transaction lock is a flag (often in the form of a
specific file) which is used by the system to prevent two (or more)
processes from working at the same time on some important system
resource. Without such a flag, the processes could end up leaving the
resource in a confused state.

> How to Overcome this?

My advice is not to.

You don't surf the web as an administrator user, do you?

Right, you wouldn't do such a silly thing. So, logged in as the
non-administrator user that you want to use to surf the web and see
all the flash, do the following:

Go back to adobe and get the tarball version, instead of the rpm.

Start a shell and do the following in it:

cd .mozilla/plugins
tar xzf ~/Desktop/<flash-tarball-name.tar.gz>

This allows you to view flash as that user. Other users will not have
access to flash unless you do the same thing for them.

This is not to be mean to the other users. It's to protect the other
users from the vulnerabilities in flash. If flash is installed
globally (the usual thing that happens when you use the rpm package),
all users become vulnerable. Including that administrator account that
you never use to get on the web, except to fedoraproject.org and other
places where you need to read the manuals, etc.

Fedoraproject.org will hopefully never have malicious code, but if you
use google and find something interesting on feboraproject.org, you
might not notice. So it's just better to keep the misbehaving plugin
away from the system libraries and such.

The flash plugin is not that big so having a copy in your surfing user
account and another in your children's surfing account, etc., is not
going to be a problem, except that every time adobe cleans out another
vulnerability, you'll need to remember to unpack it in all the surfing
accounts.

There are probably no more than three of those, anyway, right?

Joel Rees