I’ve recently been having a hell of a time using web pages that use flash. Every so often flash would seem to crash and only display a grey box where the flash content was supposed to load. The only thing that would revive the flashplugin was to close Firefox and reopen it. The issue was completely random and there was no real way to replicate the problem. This was driving me insane, until today.

I noticed on the Adobe Labs website that a new alpha was released on July 30th 2009! I usually do not suggest moving over to alpha release software, however in this case I figured that the aptitude installed version was screwed up that it couldn’t be much worse. And so far I can say it seems to be a huge improvement, but I won’t say its fixed as the problem was random. I’ll have to run it for a few days and see. But I did notice that flash performance was greatly increased, flash seems to load significantly faster than it did before. So that is definitely encouraging! Here’s how I got it working.

  1. Uninstall any and all flash plugin’s you may have installed.
    2. $ sudo aptitude purge flashplugin flashplugin-nonfree flashplayer-mozilla flashplugin-installer nspluginwrapper
  2. Search your computer to verify all plugin’s have been removed
    3. $ sudo find / -name *flash*.so
  3. The only one’s that should be left are morph and Open Office flash plugin’s.  Leave those as I don’t believe they are related.  Manually remove any other’s that may still be left over. Once confirmed download the new prerelease from Adobe’s site.
    4. $ wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
  4. Extract the tarball
    5. $ tar zxvf libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
  5. Check to see that the plugin directory exists
    6. $ ls ~/.mozilla/plugins
  6. If it does not exist create the directory (be sure to do this as a regular user, not through root or sudo)
    7. $ mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins
  7. Move the newly downloaded & extracted libflashplugin.so
    8. $ mv libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/
  8. Verify it was moved
    9. $ ls ~/.mozilla/plugins/
  9. Close Mozilla Firefox and open it again and test it out!

Now keep in mind, this is a Prerelease and in alpha stages.  There could be other problems, but like I mentioned earlier it was a big improvement over the aptitude installed flash plugins.  Feel free to report your findings here as I will do the same.

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