Since I upgraded one box to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), and another box to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), it was quite irritating for some time to watch youtube videos with no or flaky sound along with skipping videos.
In Firefox, when I went to “Tools -> Add-ons -> Plugins”, or just typed “about:plugins” in the address bar, I saw that I do have “Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124”, however it just dis not want to work smoothly. The same was true for “”Shockwave Flash 9.0 r100”.
So you would think that the right thing to do was to go to the Adobe website: “http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/“, choose “get the one for Ubuntu 8.04+” option, and download the latest (v10 / v11 / v12 / v13 / v14 / whatever…) flash player, right? Well, not really. After I did that, I saw both “Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124” and “Shockwave Flash 10.0 r15”, so I disabled 9.0 one, and enabled 10.0 – should be good right? NOPE.
What appeared to be the solution for this mess of flash plugins was to do some “sudo apt-cache search flash…” searches, and figure out what needed to go from both systems.
There were two culprits that overruled the only enabled “Shockwave Flash 10.0 vr15” plugin: “swfdec-mozilla” and “mozilla-plugin-gnash”. And hence they are going to be removed with all other potential inconsistencies:
sudo apt-get remove -y --purge flashplugin-nonfree gnash gnash-common mozilla-plugin-gnash swfdec-mozilla libflashsupport nspluginwrapper sudo rm -f /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/*flash* sudo rm -f ~/.mozilla/plugins/*flash* sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/*flash* sudo rm -f /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins/*flash* sudo rm -rfd /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper |
After this, I had a good feeling and went to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ again, chose “get the one for Ubuntu 8.04+”, saved “install_flash_player_version_linux.deb” locally, and install it with my bare hands:
sudo dpkg -i install_flash_player_10_linux.deb |
Restarted Firefox, and let me tell you – Quality of my Ubuntu life has improved significantly since then!
Want to improve the quality of your life significantly? Follow the two steps above :)