Fixing 'Adobe Flash Player was blocked because it is out of date' under Debian

Jun 13, 2017

After updating Chromium to version 59 under Debian 64 I was getting a message saying that 'Adobe Flash Player was blocked because it is out of date' whenever I opened a site with a Flash content.

The Fix

1. Uninstall the out-of-date version:

   $ sudo apt-get remove pepperflashplugin-nonfree

2. Download the up-to-date version:

   $ wget https://fpdownload.adobe.com/pub/flashplayer/pdc/26.0.0.126/flash_player_ppapi_linux.x86_64.tar.gz

3. Unpack it:

   $ tar xzf flash_player_ppapi_linux.x86_64.tar.gz

4. Copy the libpepflashplayer.so file to the /usr/lib/chromium/plugins directory (create it if it doesn't exist already):

   $ sudo mkdir /usr/lib/chromium/plugins
   $ sudo cp libpepflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium/plugins

5. Tell Chromium where to look for Flash Player:

   $ sudo echo 'export CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --ppapi-flash-path=/usr/lib/chromium/plugins/ \ 
   libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flash-version=26.0.0.126 --disable-bundled-ppapi-flash"' >> /etc/ \
   chromium.d/default-flags

   The --disable-bundled-ppapi-flash flag is probably not needed but one never knows :)

6. Close all Chromium windows and run Chromium again.

   NB: Typing chrome://restart in a tab won't update the Chromium flags so Chromium will still use the out-of-date version of Flash Player.

That's it. I hope it helped you.