Sunday, June 6, 2010

Problems with Adobe Flash on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

I have spent the past two days trying to fix my Ubuntu system after performing a system update! It really was a pain in the butt, so I wanted to share my efforts.

I am running the 64 bit version of Ubuntu on my system. The 64-bit version of the Flash plugin is not officially supported yet.

You can use the Ubuntu software center to install Flash, but I found that someone at Adobe has created a nice script that lets you install/remove Flash using a simple GUI installer. Just download the appropriate version and make the file executable, then run it.

Yes, you can use the command line to make the file executable, but, you can also just right click and modify permissions. I don't like to offer command line methods to people who are afraid of Linux. :-)

After you've tried the different versions, test out youtube and hulu.

What I found is that Hulu videos just play the ads in the beginning, but then the screen goes blank.

What you can do is install Hulu Desktop for Linux. This will probably work just fine. But, there is a potential error that you might encounter (I did).

When launching, you might find that you get an error : "Hulu Desktop could not locate the Flash plugin. If you already have it installed, please modify ~/.huludesktop with the correct location of libflashplayer.so."

Don't fret! What you need to do, is go to your Home folder and hit CTRL+H to show hidden files and folder. Find the text file ".huludesktop" and open it for editing (just double click). Go to flash_location line and edit the line to read:
flash_location = /usr/share/ubufox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
Now, just save and close the file, and launch Hulu Desktop. You should be off and running. Happy Huluing!

NOTE: This is where my flash player file is located. You might want to go to the command line terminal and run "locate libflashplayer.so" to expose the locations of your flash player just to be sure.

Exit

1 comment:

  1. An alternative approach ...

    If you just download the alpha 64bit flash player from Adobe and extract the libflashplayer.so file to your home folder you can create a symlink to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

    Then nearly every program that needs it will find it and you can just update the one in your home folder with newer versions and the update will automatically be available to all.

    I use Midnight Commander to create Symlinks, much easier than trying to remember command line syntax that I only need once a year.

    cheers

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