Installing Adobe Flash 9 for Firefox on Mac OS X

Awesome. I bought a Mac for bouncing pretty icons and applications that “just work.” Apple threw in command-line bullshit and chmod silliness at no extra cost.

Thanks Apple! As if it wasn’t inconvenient enough to have a hundred extra files laying around after every install along with manually moving every installed app to the Applications folder, I get to drop to the terminal window on a regular basis. I haven’t done that on an MS machine since Windows 98.

Here’s a fix for yet another retarded Firefox/OS X-related problem, this time installing Adobe Flash 9 and getting the following error:

Error 2: Access privileges error & “Error creating file: 1008:5, -5000 Access Denied Error”

Straight from Adobe’s help section is the following:

If you have Firefox installed, use the following instructions to temporarily change directory permissions:

1. Open the Terminal application (in the Applications > Utilities folder) and type the following text:
   sudo chmod 775 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/components
   (Read/Write/Execute for Owner and Group, but read only for Other. Or -rw--rw--r)
   
2. Enter the password for the ROOT user.
3. Reinstall Flash Player 9.
4. Test Flash Player 9 in your browser.
5. Use the Terminal to reset permissions on those directories:
   sudo chmod 755 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/components

For those of you who are uncomfortable with terminals, here’s my brief tutorial:

• Use your first and second pinky finger* on your left hand to hold down “Control” and “Command”, and your right pinky to hit the up arrow.
• Click on the “Applications” folder, then click on “Utilities” and finally select “Terminal”
• Cut and paste the first line into your terminal. Enter the administrator password (which is yours if you’re the only user of the machine) Caps matter, which is why Apple makes sure to use them all over the place instead of typing everything in lower case.
• Install Adobe Flash 9 like you would in a real OS.
• Cut and paste the second line into your terminal window. Hit enter.