Some time ago I read about nspluginwrapper on gentoo-portage and now finally tried if it works. With this little programm it should be able to wrap 32bit plugins with 64bit browsers, so you don’t need to chroot oder install 32bit binarys. It’ some kind of ndiswrapper but for all kind of browser plugins. At the moment it supports:

  • Acrobat Reader (5.0.9, 7.0.1)
  • DejaVu Libre (3.5.14)
  • Flash Player (7.0, 9.0)
  • Linux JPEG 2000 (0.0.2)
  • Mplayerplug-in (2.80, 3.25)
  • Real Player (10.0.5)
  • ICA Citrix Client
  • Most important for me is the flash plugin, especially for music in youtube or on sites like mixupload. It’s also possible to watch/hear that stuff without flash, I know that, but with flash it’s kind of faster and if I like it I can still download it the way I used to before having flash on 64 bit ;)

    The installation is really easy and straight, so let’s go:

    First you need to emerge nspluginwrapper.

    emerge -av nspluginwrapper

    If you are running a stable gentoo system you will need put it in package.keywords as it’s still in testing (it’s running really fine here so try it)

    echo net-www/nspluginwrapper >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

    Now as an example we will try installing the flash plugin with

    emerge -av netscape-flash

    and tell nspluginwrapper to scan and install the existing plugins with

    nspluginwrapper -v -a -i

    Now there should be something like that in your about:plugins screen and flash should work fine. For example a youtube video.

    nspluginwrapper on amd64nspluginwrapper with youtube video