problem installing flash and jre

When I installed mepis 6 on a new system for some reason I have been unable to install either the current JRE and a workable Flash player. I've tried many things that I thought had worked to install these in the past, including using the flashpluginnonfree package with synaptic, apt-get, and downloading the files from the respective sites. My methods don't work in various ways but a puzzling symptom when trying to install files downloaded from the adobe and sun in konsole (as su and basically following the instructions from adobe and sun) are messages that the program requires any one of a number of files from the /bin directory, eg, bin/bash bin/mkdir etc, it's quite a long list. These files are there and have what I believe are proper permissions. I don't understand the genesis of these messages or know what I can do resolve them. Any thoughts? More details on request.

Mark