Alex W.'s Blog

Ubuntu + Flash = <3

Finally! I have tried so many so called “solutions” to get Ubuntu and Flash to play nicely together to play Youtube.com fullscreen. After trying so many, the overload gpu trick, media.cfg, a Firefox app supposed to auto fix it, random lines of code, I’ve finally found a fix that works, at least for me. Well, its not very refined, I can’t figure out which of these two following fixes did it, or if they both did, but here goes (btw I have tested this to work in Chromium): First follow the guide on OMG!Ubuntu!

Keep Firefox updated with the latest patched version Adobe Flash thanks to Google Chrome.

Thanks to a partnership between Google and Adobe Google’s Chrome browser ships with a built-in version of Flash that is more recent than that available to download individually. This ensures better performance and better protection.

Google Chrome ships with an more recent version of Flash than available to download

Using it in Firefox is simple although the trick requires you to have Google Chrome installed in-order to recieve the automatic upgrades to the Flash plugin. No big deal – head to Google.com/chrome and download the relevant .deb file for your system. Once installed proceed with the steps below, courtesy of reader David H.

Using Chome’s built-in Flash in Firefox

  • Open a Terminal session and navigate to the following directory: -
    • cd /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins
  • Now link the Flash player from Chrome to Firefox by running this command: - * sudo ln -s /opt/google/chrome/libgcflashplayer.so ./ > Now open Firefox, head to the ‘Add-ons > Plugins’ menu and disable the default version of Flash (if any).

Now you can enjoy an auto-updated Flash player in Mozilla Firefox so long as you keep Google Chrome updated via Update Manager.

Then, if you already have it installed, unistall any Flash stuff from the Ubuntu Software Center. Finally, procede to install the software called Adobe Flash Plugin (under version my was listed as 10.2.159.1ubuntu1 (flashplugin-installer)):

I may have rebooted a few times after but when I went to Youtube.com and watched a random video, it worked!