29 November 2008

Flash 10 player problems in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid

I last upgraded my Ubuntu (Linux) 8.04 laptop to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. As usual it was a problemless upgrade; I only had to setup my VPN connection again because it was all integrated now in NetworkManager. But within a day I saw my browser (Firefox 3.0) did not play Flash anymore.

Firefox served the "plugin install" dialog. I installed the Adobe Flash player, but I was not able to get the Adobe Flash player running. The GNash player was I nightmare; very slow and much content not playing at all. Even a manual download from the Adobe site did not help.

After some googling I seemed to be the only one with this problem. But found a hint: look at ldd output.
Finally I downloaded and installed the deb-package from Adobe again:
    wget -c http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_10_linux.deb
sudo dpkg -i install_flash_player_10_linux.deb

I ran the ldd command:
    ldd /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so

The output showed that some libraries were missing. I could fix that by installing a needed package:
    sudo apt-get install libnss3-1d

And creating some symbolic links after that:
    cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s libnss3.so.1d libnss3.so
sudo ln -s libsmime3.so.1d libsmime3.so
sudo ln -s libssl3.so.1d libssl3.so

And I could again view Flash 10 movies as before!