Historically, installing Flash Player, and therefore getting access to much of the internet’s video content, on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions has been a right pain.

You can download the archive from Adobe and run through the text-based installer, but Ubuntu Hardy Heron actually makes it a whole lot easier than previous releases (if you’re using Firefox at least).

Here’s how.

Launch Firefox 3 Beta 5, and browse to any site where you know that Flash is used (YouTube is a good one, but you need to be on an actual video page, not just the home page).

Click the Install Missing Plugins button, and in the next window, select the top option for the Adobe Flash Player installer.

There will be a couple of confirmation dialogues you will need to accept, including enabling the multiverse software repository for non-open source software.

The installer then downloads the package and gets installing. The installation process might appear to sit there for a while doing nothing, but really that is just the Flash Player installer doing its stuff behind the scenes, just not feeding its progress back to you.

Once that is done, however, you click Finish, the page reloads and the Flash Player works!

It really is a great improvement to the old installation method, and makes getting Flash up and running on your new Ubuntu system pretty painless!