By default, Intrepid on both i386 and x86_64 comes with the 32bit flashplayer 10 through nspluginwrapper. A lot of the crashes people see come from nspluginwrapper itself, which is very unstable in Hardy.

A new version of nspluginwrapper in Intrepid fixes a lot of crashes though, so you’re better of with Intrepid in any case.

However, since mid november, Adobe finally came through on one of the most requested feature Linux users around the globe begged for/requested, real 64bit support!

For an alpha version, i must say it is pretty rock solid on my system. Let’s get on and replace the default 32bit flashplayer/nspluginwrapper combo with this new goodie!

First of all, let’s remove any already installed versions of Flash, along with nspluginwrapper.

# apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree nspluginwrapper

Next up, download the 64-bit Flash plugin from Adobe Labs. Select the tar.gz.

Unpack it and copy the resulting libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins if you want to enable it for all users, or in ~/.mozilla/plugins to enable it only for your current user. Restarting Firefox and browsing to about:plugins should show the newly installed Flash plugin.

Enjoy your native 64-bit Flashplayer

First of all, open source alternatives such as Gnash and swfdec are not yet ready for the big masses. It’s nice to see them growing bit by bit, but for now, we are bound to the official plugins for ‘decent’ Flash support.

First of all, let’s get rid of libflashsupport if it’s still installed. This little piece of **** is a big cause of instability in our quest to a stable Flash experience. So let’s remove it right away!

# apt-get remove libflashsupport

Ok, now that’s gone, lets make Alsa output to Pulseaudio by default. We do this by installing libasound2-plugins, and creating the file /etc/asound.conf.

# apt-get install libasound2-plugins

Contents of /etc/asound.conf are as follows:

pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
}

Just copy-paste it in the configuration file.

Next up, nspluginwrapper. This package will “jail” Flash inside its own little environment, so that if Flash crashes, it will only take down the wrapper, and not your whole Firefox. A Flash crash will result in a gray area where your Flash should be, instead of a suddenly disappearing Firefox. Quite an improvement already

Let’s install it:

# wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/16234689/nspluginwrapper_0.9.91.5-2ubuntu2.8.04.1~mt1_i386.deb

# dpkg -i “nspluginwrapper_0.9.91.5-2ubuntu2.8.04.1~mt1_i386.deb”

Now you can (re-)install flashplugin-nonfree 9 to make it nspluginwrapper aware. Although it will not take down your Firefox anymore, it will still be incredibly unstable, and lots of sites will have gray areas on their pages.

So we will take one additional step, and install flashplugin-nonfree 10. The latest release candidate to be exact, which appears A LOT more stable than 9 ever was on my several systems.

We will have to download and install the deb manually from https://launchpad.net/~psyke83/+archive .

Click on the Hardy entry for flashplugin-nonfree, and download the correct deb for your system. Currently, for i386 ( 32bit ) desktops, this is the file you need .

Install it either by double clicking it on your desktop, or doing this on the commandline:

# dpkg -i flashplugin-nonfree-*.deb

Restart Firefox just to be sure, and then browse to “about:plugins”.

You should see something similar to the image below:

Which means it worked! Try watching a movie in youtube while listening to some music on your audio player. Both should play without problems, and most of the crashes should be gone!

Enjoy your smooth desktop experience