Yousef Ourabi

I recently did a fresh install of the amd64 gusty gibbon release only to find the flash plugin was no longer working.

The problem is that Adobe has released a new version of the plugin, however the ubuntu team has still not updated the deb package to contain the updated md5sum checksum, so after apt-get dutifully downloads the plugin the file integrity check fails, however worse still the installation continues and registers the flashplugin-nonfree package as installed WITHOUT actually being installed (which is very confusing)…

The problem is that this fails silently behind the scenes as most users will just use the ubuntu-fox modification to automagically install the appropriate firefox plugin, if however you installed it from the command line with something like apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree you would indeed see the following error:

Download done.
md5sum mismatch install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
The Flash plugin is NOT installed.

Until the updated .deb package is pushed out upstream you can build your own plugin with the following steps:

Note: The new flash plugin has a new dependency the “cdbs” package — install it with the following command.

sudo apt-get install cdbs

wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/10756602/flashplugin-nonfree_9.0.115.0ubuntu2.tar.gz
tar -zxvf flashplugin-nonfree_9.0.115.0ubuntu2.tar.gz
cd flashplugin-nonfree-9.0.115.0ubuntu2
dpkg-buildpackage -b -rfakeroot

cd ../

dpkg -i flashplugin-nonfree_9.0.115.0ubuntu2_amd64.deb

For the incurably curious here is the full bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/173890

Ubuntu Wall of Shame

1. Apache on Ubuntu leaves a legacy (init.d broken)
2. trac on 64bit Gusty Broken
3. Flash on 64bit Ubuntu broken

Filed under: Linux