A guide to set up Basilisk with working Adobe Flash after 2021 (under Linux)

Updated: February 05, 2024

Some PSA

Do not follow this guide unless you acknoweldge that you are likely more prone to security vulnerabilities.

Since Adobe killed off Flash including security updates (except Mainland China), this guide would lead your Linux system to be more vulnerable to attacks.

If you prefer a secure alternative, consider using Ruffle or Flashpoint to continue playing games or animations.

A much more straightforward but not recommended for security reasons alternatives are CleanFlash or FlashPatch.

Installing Basilisk

1. Download Basilisk here.
2. Select the Linux version.
3. Extract the tarball into somewhere (preferrably at your home directory).
4. After that, make a symbolic link of basilisk to $PATH (ln -s ~/basilisk/basilisk /usr/bin/basilisk.
5. Make symbolic links for each icon.

ln -s ~/basilisk/browser/chrome/icons/default/default16.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/basilisk.png
ln -s ~/basilisk/browser/chrome/icons/default/default32.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/basilisk.png
ln -s ~/basilisk/browser/chrome/icons/default/default48.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/basilisk.png
ln -s ~/basilisk/browser/icons/mozicon128.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/basilisk.png

6. If you have update-alternatives, you might want to inform about the presence of Basilisk. Run these commands if you want to do so:

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gnome-www-browser gnome-www-browser /usr/bin/basilisk 100
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-www-browser x-www-browser /usr/bin/basilisk 100

7. If you want Pale Moon to use the dictionaries from hunspell, run the following:

rm -r ~/basilisk/dictionaries
ln -s /usr/share/hunspell ~/basilisk/dictionaries

8. Make a desktop entry for Basilisk. Put it on /usr/share/applications/basilisk.desktop.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Basilisk
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
Keywords=Internet;WWW;Browser;Web;Explorer
Exec=env MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins basilisk %u
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=basilisk
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;Internet
MimeType=video/webm;text/html;image/png;image/jpeg;image/gif;application/xml;application/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/x-xpinstall;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;
StartupNotify=true

9. Run gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/hicolor to update icon cache
10. You have just installed Basilisk! But you're not done my friend!

Installing Adobe Flash Player

1. Go to this link from the Wayback Machine. This would download Flash 32.0.0.371, one of the last versions without the 2021 killswitch.
2. Extract the tar archive to a temporary location.
3. Copy libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins. This is the NPAPI binary for Flash.
4. Copy the contents of the usr folder to /usr. This contains additional files and the configurator tool.
5. Done you have the Flash Player installed!

Actually using Flash on Basilisk

To run Flash inside Basilisk, run the browser using the desktop entry or by running MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins basilisk on the terminal.

It is an odd quirk of the browser, so to run it with just basilisk only in the terminal, add export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins to your .*shrc.

After that, you can now enjoy Flash content online!

Screenshots