Firefox flash plugin on Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon 64bit?

Posted on December 28th, 2007 by 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
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • Reddit

Filed under: Linux


« Ruby 1.9 released FreeBSD 7.0 RC1 released »

7 Responses to “Firefox flash plugin on Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon 64bit?”

  1. Scotti, on January 8th, 2008 at 4:16 am Said:

    Thanks for this. I was wondering about the same thing and figured this was the issue.

    I also had to install dpkg-dev, debhelper, and fakeroot packages.

    Scotti

  2. trac install broken on 64bit ubuntu | Yousef Ourabi, on March 2nd, 2008 at 6:04 pm Said:

    [...] industry to fix. The last time it was with the flash plugin in their repositories see “Firefox flash plugin broken on 64bit systems“. These issues both came after many of us read at the frustration members of the community [...]

  3. Apache on ubuntu leaves a legacy | Yousef Ourabi, on March 9th, 2008 at 3:11 am Said:

    [...] Flash on 64bit Ubuntu broken These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

  4. Ubuntu Wall of Shame | Yousef Ourabi, on March 9th, 2008 at 3:17 am Said:

    [...] Flash on 64bit Ubuntu broken [...]

  5. Jon, on April 1st, 2008 at 12:07 am Said:

    I had to install the same packages as Scotti.

    Thanks much for this little tutorial - MLB.com is utterly useless without the latest version of Flash.

  6. Jimbo, on April 7th, 2008 at 2:53 am Said:

    THANK YOU for this - this fixed some glaring issues I’d been having trying to limp along on the old r48 plugin as installed by a script I found on ubuntuforums!

  7. Ubuntu Wall of Shame | Yousef Ourabi, on April 27th, 2008 at 4:19 am Said:

    [...] Flash on 64bit Ubuntu broken These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

Leave a Reply