I was a bit at a loss regarding how to manipulate Iceweasel's flash player in Lenny. Lenny ships with swfdec as its default flash player which is fine but I wanted to try gnash since swfdec wasn't displaying Google analytics pages well. Now gnash is in the repository but once it was installed I couldn't figure out how to get Iceweasel to start using it.

This no doubt has to do with a tendency these days on my part to rely on Synaptic for simple package tasks. In so doing I miss some of the messages that are displayed at the terminal. In the end I figured out how to do it but unfortunately gnash didn't work with Google analytics either. Anyways to change Iceweasel's default flash player at the terminal simply execute this (as root) after installing the player of your choice:

 update-alternatives --config flash-mozilla.so

This will give you a list of installed plugins and allow you to choose which to use as default. Then restart Iceweasel and you're good to go.