Recently in Flash Category

I'm doing all I can to stick with Ubuntu 8.04, the long-term-support release of the world's most-talked-about Linux distribution.

But when a bug threatens my desktop harmony, I begin both attacking said bug and exploring OS alternatives because the most important thing about this particular installation — my main Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop — is that I keep working with little to no interruption.

I've had a few "issues" now in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on the Toshiba (1.3 GHz Celeron / 768 MB RAM). Here are the problems and their solutions.

Remember: I'm no coder, so unless the solutions are relatively quick and easy, I probably won't do 'em.

Problem: Every once in awhile, the keyboard stops working in mid-session.

Solution: This could be a hardware issue, or it could be something in Ubuntu. This doesn't happen all that often, but when it does, killing X with ctrl-alt-backspace brings back the keyboard. I consider this a less-than-optimal solution, but a solution nonetheless. I'll be keeping an eye on the issue.

Problem: When I use Flash to, say, watch a video, everything works fine. But then when I try to listen to an audio file with Rhythmbox, the sound doesn't work. Rebooting brings back non-Flash audio.

Solution: A little Googling revealed that this is a common problem. I consider this a serious bug in Ubuntu 8.04, and I can't believe that it hasn't been automatically solved for all users. Turns out it's a problem with the "new" Pulse Audio for Linux. To fix the problem, add the following package (either through Synaptic, apt or Aptitude):

libflashsupport

Yep, just this one package will fix the problem with Flash and Pulse Audio. I quote from the package description:

Support library for sound output of Flash 9 with pulseaudio Due to various bugs in the Flash 9 plugin sound output of Flash 9 through the pulseaudio soundserver doesn't work properly. This library adds a clutch to make Flash 9 sound output in pulseaudio possible.

For further information see http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/43 and http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/FlashPlayer9Solution

Problem: Flash periodically dies and takes the Firefox browser with it. This happens occasionally with YouTube video but all the time in the Brightcove 3 console, which I use to manage video on our site. Having a critical Web/Flash-based app become unusable is a huge problem.

Solution: I ran a test on my Debian Lenny laptop, which is using a Flash 10 .deb package direct from Adobe. No problem there.

I'm trying not to install lots of packages from outside the usual Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) repositories, and I've been mostly successful in that regard, even though there are more than a few packages for which I'd love a newer version.

Since Ubuntu Hardy uses Flash 9.0.159, I figured that going to Flash 10 one way or another stood a very good chance of solving my problem.

But I didn't want to leave the world of Hardy to do it. So first I tried the Hardy backport of the Flash plugin.

What are backports, you ask? Following that link in the last sentence will tell you all about Ubuntu Backports, but I'll just sum up and say that backports are newer versions of packages that are built to run on older distributions so users can stick with a version of their operating system that is known to work with their hardware (or for other reasons) but get either one, a few or a lot of newer packages without resorting to an upgrade.

Backtracking briefly, I did consider:

• Replacing Ubuntu 8.04 with Debian Lenny
• Upgrading Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10
• Replacing Ubuntu 8.04 with either Slackware 12.2, Zenwalk 6.0 or another OS to be named later (once I scraped together a few more candidates)

After reading the Ubuntu Backports page, I decided that rather than mess around with my repositories, or resort to the Debian-user practice of mixing Backports and Stable package management through the use of what's called "pinning," since I was only interested in a single package, I'd just grab the .deb and install it on my local machine. (Disadvantage to the latter: Packages not in repositories not recognized by the system won't automatically update. Advantage: It's a simple, intuitive process.)

I easily found the Flash 10 backport for Hardy. But it wouldn't install. The package tries to fetch a file from Adobe/Macromedia, and that particular file is no longer on the Adobe server.

Translation: The package wouldn't install.

The next step: I went into Synaptic and removed the flashplugin-nonfree package, which even though not installed all the way was still "there." (There IS a bug report for this issue, and if this bug is fixed, I still think that Hardy backports is the best way to deal with this issue

Then I went to the Adobe Web site, got the .deb package for Flash 10 and installed it.

Since I didn't mention it, installing .deb packages is easy. In GNOME (Ubuntu's GUI), just click on the package (either double-click in the default setup or single-click, since that's the way I have my Nautilus file manager set up) and then enter your password when prompted.

So far, Flash 10 from Adobe in Ubuntu 8.04 is doing great in Brightcove and appears to be doing just as well with YouTube video. And after about a dozen or more Firefox/Flash crashes Friday night, if this fix turns out to be the right one, a large measure of stability will have re-entered my computing world.

I realize that Flash is a closed-source technology controlled by a single company, and therefore is a huge pain in the ass for all concerned, including myself. But in my particular situation, I need to have it, along with Java, to get a couple of critical tasks done.

In the end: I was ready to hop off Ubuntu 8.04 onto another distro. I had already eliminated Ubuntu 9.04 due to my X issues (although it's possible those issues have been fixed in subsequent 9.04 updates), but I could've easily (or not so easily, given setup time and effort) moved to Ubuntu 8.10, Debian Lenny, Zenwalk, Slackware or even FreeBSD.

I did strongly consider an 8.04-8.10 upgrade, since that would've given me Flash 10 from a Ubuntu repository. If Ubuntu 8.10 would've have also given me OpenOffice 3.0.1, I would've been more inclined to upgrade, but since 8.10 includes the same OO 2.4 I'm running now, I decided to stick with 8.04 (and OO 2.4) and just get Flash 10 manually from Adobe.

For the moment I'm glad to have another Ubuntu 8.04 problem solved. I've bought myself more time with the LTS and don't have to do a reinstall or major upgrade (and risk developing more new problems than I'm solving old ones).

Final, final word: I'm sure at least some of you are thinking, "He should file a bug report." It's possible that this bug is close to mine, although my specific issue (with the Brightcove3 console) isn't one anybody else has come across.

After planning for weeks to take my main production laptop from OpenBSD 4.4 to 4.5, I sweated through the upgrade only to lose what was perfect X compatibility and pull the "kill switch," which in this case was transferring everything in my freshly rsync'd backup to my identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, a system I've been running for quite awhile on this and another laptop — and which has thus far proven itself to be stable enough for the pounding I give these machines in my daily work.

OpenBSD 4.4 basically "saved" me and one of these marginal Toshiba laptops (both were destined for the garbage) last November when I could barely get an install CD of any type to boot. The install floppy in OpenBSD enabled me to quickly set up a system that worked quite well and did almost everything I needed it to do. And stability was almost a given. I rarely had a problem that wasn't inherent to OpenBSD itself (such as the difficulty of installing Java, nothing past Flash Player 7, the extra steps required to properly configure things such as CUPS).

Since the system ran so well — just like Ubuntu 8.04, video on this Intel-based system ran perfectly with no xorg.conf — I kept it going for the entire six months of the OpenBSD 4.4 release's life.

As those who use OpenBSD know, upgrading the operating system is not as easy as it is in your average Linux distribution. It pretty much comes with the territory that a -release upgrade requires preparation, following instructions, and a bit of manual command-line work. Many times I've heard — both in OpenBSD and in Linux for that matter — that it's easier and cleaner to do a full reinstall rather than an in-place upgrade.

I will still try a full reinstall of OpenBSD 4.5. And I'd like to try running -current — the OpenBSD development branch that can be regularly updated and which is famously stable despite the "development" tag.

But right here, right now, I can't spend weeks diagnosing my X issues (briefly, there's some funky junk hanging from the cursor, and "artifacts" linger on the screen, which isn't redrawn fast enough/often enough to make X usable). The same thing turned me away from Debian Lenny on this and my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop in the months before the then-Testing distro went Stable. Because of my affection for Debian (still one of my very favorite operating systems), I spent weeks trying to diagnose the problem before realizing that dozens of other distros relieved me of the need to obsess (unsuccessfully) over it.

Right now the Gateway, used by our 5-year-old dual-boots Ubuntu 8.04 for her and CentOS 5.3 just because it runs so extremely well on that particular laptop.

And for months now I've had this other Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 as a backup. I have Java installed, which I do need. Flash, too. The Opera Web browser.

Today I added Inkscape, Thunderbird, gFTP and Gparted.

On the OpenBSD laptop, I had about 1 GB of e-mail in Thunderbird. It makes rsyncing the box such hell that I'm thinking of writing a script that EXCLUDES the Thunderbird files just so the rest of the backup doesn't take so damn long ... but I digress.

I figured out how to bring my Thunderbird settings and mail over to the Ubuntu machine. I did the same with my Firefox bookmarks.

-- Begin tutorial:

Moving bookmarks from one Firefox 3 installation to another:

• Since Firefox now uses the SQlite database to store/organize its bookmarks, simply moving the bookmarks.html file from one Firefox 3 installation to another will DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You need to do it another way, which I describe right here. First, grab the bookmarks.html file from your old FF installation and put it somewhere in your /home directory where you can easily find it.

• In the Firefox 3.0 installation where you want to IMPORT the bookmarks, go to the Bookmarks tab and click on/choose Organize Bookmarks.

• Click on the Import and Backup drop-down menu and click Import HTML.

• Then navigate to the bookmarks.html file from your old FF 3 installation (you have moved it over already, haven't you?) and click it to bring it into your new installation.

• Note: In Ubuntu at least, this process WON'T allow you to see hidden files or directories, so before you begin, copy your old bookmarks.html file to a place in your home directory where you don't need to go into your old installation's .mozilla directory, for instance.

• FYI: In both of my Firefox 3 installations, the bookmarks.html file is located here:

  /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.html

  In the above example, "username" is your actual username, and the eight x's are the unique alphanumeric prefix that Firefox gives to your "default" directory under /.mozilla/firefox/
  

-- End tutorial.

-- Resume rant.

OK, so I'm fully operational in Ubuntu at this point. My respect and admiration for the developers and users of OpenBSD remains, and I hope to get the other Toshiba fully operational under OpenBSD 4.5 as soon as possible.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say I was relieved to have, in Ubuntu, a machine and system that easily updates all of its software with a few clicks and provides me with what — at this point — is a trouble-free working environment.

Of course that could all change. I'll see over the next week how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS performs on this hardware, with my chosen applications and for the tasks I have.

I could start the distro-hopping merry-go-round and go back to Debian, try out Slackware, ZenWalk, etc., but right now if Linux in this form does what I need it to do (not crash, run acceptably fast, wash, rinse, repeat), I'll be sticking with Ubuntu as long as it fills the bill.

It's not hard to figure out why the Flash plugin for the Opera browser in OpenBSD works with YouTube (no small thing) and little else.

That's because the port for the Opera Flash plugin hasn't been updated since 2006 and installs version 7 of the Flash plugin.

Version 7.

There's a newer version of Flash (version 9) at this master site, but I'm unsure whether or not that will work in OpenBSD.

To dig deeper into the Opera Flash plugin port, look at the CVS log.

Unsuccessful experiment: To make a long story short, I did find Version 9 of Flash for Linux in the same place as the OpenBSD port finds Version 7. I downloaded the tar.gz file, unzipped it, untarred it, dropped it in a directory and pointed Opera to the new plugin.

When I tried to play a Flash video, the plugin crashed after the first few seconds.

I didn't expect it to work and wasn't surprised when it didn't. I pointed Opera back to the old Flash plugin and went about my business.

I decided to get deeper into Puppy 4.1.2 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

I'm always looking for platforms on which I can do all my Daily News-related work, which means I need the Java runtime and Flash video.

Well, there is a Java package for Puppy. I'm surprised Java isn't part of the base install, but it appears not. I installed the package, and I even brought in the Opera Web browser to augment Seamonkey.

Both browsers are performing well, but for some reason Flash doesn't work in either. I distinctly remember Flash working in all of the Puppy 2 and 3 releases I've used previously, and now I'm left wondering what happened.

Also, Java did NOT work in either browser, so easy use of the LogMeIn remote-desktop service is not something happening in Puppy. I'm getting to the point where I'll need to bit the proverbial bullet and install Java from source in OpenBSD on this laptop so I can get that functionality. I can live without Flash (and the Flash I do have in i386 OpenBSD via Opera is marginal at best; it works in YouTube but not in Brightcove). I can sort of live without Java.

But it's better for the work that I do to have both of these things working well.

Also, I was surprised to see not Pidgin or Gaim as the IM client in Puppy but something I'd never heard of. Pidgin is available as a package, so that's not such a problem.

The end result is that while Puppy 4.1.2. runs quite well at first blush, I need to look closer at why I was so unsuccessful at getting Flash and Java to work. It should be easier than this.

And while Flash remains somewhat of a problem in OpenBSD (I probably need to be running an up-to-date Linux such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, Zenwalk ... take your pick) I'll probably stick with it for the time being as my primary OS.

It's been so long since I built a Debian Etch box, I had to find my own entry on Debian's decision to take the Flash Player Nonfree plugin out of Etch and restrict it to Debian Backports.

Besides Flash being a closed-source program, it's also a huge security risk (the executable nature of Flash data being a "vector" of entry to your system, if I have it right), I'm not surprised that the Debian project decided to do this. Developers don't like to "maintain" code they can't even see.

If you do want Flash (and many of us do need it, even if we don't always want it), there is a page on the Debian Wiki about how to use Backports solely for the purposes of installing the Flash player. That's if you don't use a lot of Backports (and I don't use any) and don't want to use that repository for anything other than Flash.

As I say in my previous entry, back when the Flash player was in the Debian Etch repositories, I could never get it to work, and instead I either used the .deb package from Adobe or compiled it from a .tar.gz file. Either one is easy to do. But that package isn't updated when you do an overall software update of your Linux system (if you're using a package manager like apt/Aptitude/Synaptic or RPM/Yum).

If you do want to get your Flash player directly from Adobe, besides the .tar.gz and the .deb package (which for some reason is recommended for "Ubuntu 8.04+" rather than all Debian-based architectures, there is an additional "APT package" specifically for "Ubuntu 8.04+." There are also RPM and Yum packages.

Of course, all of these are for i386 only.

If you have a PowerPC-based computer, you can use the Flash players that Adobe develops for OS 9 and OS X, but not for any of the Linux OSes that run on PowerPC (such as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu 6.06, Yellow Dog) or even any BSD operating systems (where if you are running i386 you can generally use a Linux browser and Flash player, since Linux executables generally run on these OSes).

Yep, Adobe continues to develop Flash for PowerPC on OS 9, but it won't do it for PowerPC Linux and probably never will.

So my Power Mac G4/466 runs Debian Etch very well, but it won't display Flash content because the sole entity — Adobe — that controls this pervasive technology doesn't care to port it to anything but i386 for Linux.

That's why such closed-source, proprietary technologies can really fail a great many of us. I don't begin to know what the situation is for .mp3 audio, which isn't a free, open-source technology, but I can't think of a system that won't play .mp3 audio.

Especially when it comes to the ways we store, play and display content, being open is way better than the alternative. Can you imagine what would happen if HTML itself (or CSS, or even programming languages like C and Python) were proprietary technologies? We'd be in deep trouble, and there would be much less innovation and access to content than we currently enjoy.

Open-source audio technologies such as Ogg aren't used all that much, and they should be used more. Development is ongoing on Gnash, an open-source Flash alternative, and if it ever works, I'll be extremely grateful for it.

I don't claim to know exactly what Adobe AIR is all about, and from what I can tell, it's not ported to Linux yet, but it does promise that developers can use standard text editors and a freely distributed runtime (as free as the Flash player is, I imagine) to run whatever widgets/applications are created with it.

Not needing expensive proprietary tools to create software is a very good thing. But having the whole process, from coding to compiling, be free and open-source is another thing. And it is a way better one, too.

Disclaimer: I do use quite a bit of proprietary software, even in open-source operating systems.

There's a lot of work I have to do in Windows XP and in Mac's OS X.

I also run the Flash player on many of my Linux and OpenBSD installs.

I use the Opera Web browser, which is generally available in Linux and FreeBSD and OpenBSD (via the aforementioned Linux compatibility layer) because it enables me to do a few very critical tasks that are "restricted" to IE but which for some reason are doable in Opera. Opera is free but not open-source. It also is an excellent application.

The biggest problem I see right now with Linux is the lack of a stable video-editing solution that allows independent editing of audio and video (something that Kino can't do, if I understand the situation correctly). I mean an application that, like Kino, is part of the repositories of the major Linux and BSD distributions/projects and is not in perpetual beta.

(Disclaimers end here; sorry about all the ranting).