BackTrack Linux 5 R3 Firefox/Flash Installation

I ran into some issues with the default installation of Firefox 14 on BackTrack Linux 5 R3, so here are the steps to upgrade to the latest Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Flash client plugin. The reason for this post is in regards to running Nessus v4.4.1 in BackTrack Linux. Nessus needs the Flash client plugin installed to run in a web browser; fortunately Nessus will be releasing a Nessus HTML5 client soon and we won't have to run into these issues in the future.

Kill all instances of Firefox by either closing your browser or running the pkill command.

# ps -elf | grep -i firefox

Make a new directory to download Firefox and the Flash client plugins in /tmp. Change directory to the newly created directory (e.g. /tmp/firefox).

# mkdir -p /tmp/firefox  
# cd /tmp/firefox

Remove the following files:

# rm -rf /opt/firefox/*  
# rm -rf /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/*  
# rm -f /usr/share/icons/mozicon128.png

Download the following files:

Latest releases of Firefox & Flash as of 10/11/2012:  
# wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-16.0.tar.bz2  
# wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/pdc/11.2.202.238/install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz

Extract the following files by running a TAR command:

Latest releases of Firefox & Flash as of 10/11/2012:  
 # tar -xvf firefox-16.0.tar.bz2  
 # tar -xvf install_flash_player_11_linux.x86_64.tar.gz

Copy over the newly untarred files to finish installation:

# cp -R firefox/* /opt/firefox  
# cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/  
# mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins  
# cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/

To start a new instance of Firefox, perform the following:

# /opt/firefox/firefox &

Once Firefox successfully starts, point your browser to about:plugins and confirm that the plugin is enabled.