Getting Flash to Play Nice with Pulseaudio in Ubuntu (Without Crashing)

I earlier blogged about my frustrations getting Ubuntu Linux to play audio in multiple applications using the newly implemented PulseAudio technology in the distribition. Specifically my frustrations were playing sound from web applications (typically Flash) while playing music or video on the desktop.

The solution is fairly simple and just requires installing “libflashsupport” in synaptic. From the command line just execute:

sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

Unfortunately there are several known problems with “libflashsupport” and Flash 9 in Linux. The issues can cause Firefox to crash out upon accessing Flash content on a website such as Youtube. The only solution is to upgrade your Flash to version 10 beta.

1. To upgrade to Flash 10 you first need to remove the current version of Flash from your system:
   sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree
2. Download the Beta software from the Adobe website to your home directory and extract it:
   wget -O - http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/… | tar xz -C ~
3. You may need to create the Firefox plugins directory in your user account. Just execute this command and don’t worry if it reports an error the directory already exists:
   mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins/
4. Now copy the Flash plugin to your home directory:
   cp ~/install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
5. You can now remove the software you extracted to your home directory:
   rm -r ~/install_flash_player_10_linux

Restart Firefox and you should now be up and running Flash 10 Beta. Beware: some websites do not recongise the newest version of Flash yet and will not work.

To uninstall the Beta and revert back to Flash 9:

1. First remove the plugin from your home directory:
   rm ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
2. You can now reinstall Flash 9 from Synaptic inside your Ubuntu system:
   sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

At least we know this problem will be fixed for all users when Flash 10 goes stable later this year.