Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

It has been a couple of months since I moved from a standard windows os to Ubuntu on my new laptop, and most of the time I’m pretty satisfied. Except for three issues which just wouldn’t get sorted out.

The first one is sound. There is absolutely no sound on this machine. It worked fine till the last version of Ubuntu, and I hope that it would be the same when the next version comes out this month.

The second one was wireless connectivity. Everything gets configured okay, but still it wouldn’t worked. Well, finally I have fixed that issue as well, though I will explain in a later post about fixing it.

The last one was flash. Till about five minutes back I was unable to run flash in Firefox 2.0.0.6 on my Ubuntu machine. I had spent hundreds of minutes, went through thousands of manuals, yet nothing worked. But of course, five minutes back it just all started working. If you have been having the same issues, here is how I got it to work. It’s just a quick fix, but if you have been flash-less for as long as I have been, you are going to love it.

This is how we begin :
1. aptitude remove flashplugin-nonfree

This is to get rid of the previously installed plugin. It didn’t show us any flash so we are going to be merciless with it. If it asks to get rid of ubuntu-restricted-extras, make sure you remove that too.

2. rm ~/.mozilla/plugins/*flash*

This is to get rid of the local profiles of flash already present on the system.

3. wget -c http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/ flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

Now, we download the actual file from the macromedia site to install flash player.

4. tar -xvzf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

Ok, now that we have the file, we need to unzip it, and add the files to the required folders.

5. sudo cp install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/
sudo cp install_flash_player_9_linux/flashplayer.xpt /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

First, we copy these two files to the /usr/lib/firefox folders. Sometimes it starts working here, but if you’re as unlucky as me it won’t. Which is why we have a few more steps.

6. ps -aef | grep firefox

This is where we check where firefox is really installed. If you see /usr/local/bin/firefox anywhere around, follow step 7, otherwise goto step 8

7. sudo cp flashplayer.xpt /usr/local/firefox/plugins/
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/local/firefox/plugins/

Now we move the same files to the /usr/local/firefox folder, so that the flash files are available on that profile too. If it still doesn’t work, don’t worry, we still have one more trick up our sleeve.

8. mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins/

Finally, the last trick, we create a completely local profile for flash. It won’t be visible to other users on the machine.

9. cp flashplayer.xpt /root/.mozilla/plugins/
cp libflashplayer.so /root/.mozilla/plugins/

Finally, we add the files to your local profile.

11. close firefox and restart it

Now we’re all done. Open any flash enabled site, and watch the fireworks. I tried this

If it still doesn’t work, blame your stars and drop me a mail. Also, if you would like to keep in touch with further updates, do subscribe to our feed. Cheerio