Installing Flash Player plugin on Precise Pangolin behind a proxy

You may find that the installation of the package flashplugin-installer fails if you are behind a proxy. Even though you may have instructed apt to use a proxy using a stanza like this:



Acquire {
        http {
                Proxy "http://proxy.example.com:8080/";
        };
};


the download fails. This is because the fetch script doesn't know about apt proxy settings. To fix this, do:


HTTP_PROXY=http://proxy.example.com:8080/
export HTTP_PROXY
apt-get --reinstall install flashplugin-installer


Another method is, when it fails, you will see the URL of the plugin tarball in the error messages. Download the tarball by other means and then do:


dpkg-reconfigure flashplugin-installer


Give it the directory where you have downloaded the plugin tarball to and it will unpack the tarball.