Image via WikipediaOnce you've upgraded to Jaunty and done the mandatory reboot, you're likely in for a big surprise -- Flash stops working in Firefox. This is related to a bug in Network Manager which drops the connection during the upgrade. Since Flashplugin-nonfree is really a dummy package which downloads the Flash player from Adobe, the download fails and the package shows as installed when there really isn't anything there.
The solution? There are two, one significantly better than the other.
- Reinstalling flashplugin-nonfree will solve the problem short-term, but you're still stuck with this wonky download behavior which also breaks the package whenever Adobe updates Flash and creates a binary which doesn't match the package's checksum.
- The better solution is to uninstall flashplugin-nonfree, enable the Partner repository, and install adobe-flashplugin instead. Flash is actually in that package, so you won't have any strange failures.
- Of course, you could always install the plugin manually into your $HOME/.mozilla/plugins directory, but then you'd have to manually upgrade Flash, and it being the security nightmare that it is, there's almost no circumstance in which you want to do that.
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Started to enable the Partner repo, but it says it's disabled on upgrade to Jaunty.
ReplyDelete1) Enable the partner repo,
ReplyDelete2) remove flashplugin-nonfree,
3) install adobe-flashplugin, and
4) upgrade.
Although the partner repo will be disabled (and you'll need to re-enable it after upgrade), your Flash will continue to work. You can also change the order of events there:
1) Remove flashplugin-nonfree,
2) upgrade,
3) Enable the partner repo, and
4) install adobe-flashplugin.
Either on will work. Your Flash won't break randomly anymore, either.
The package name seems to be flashplugin-installer and not adobe-flashplugin. Using Jaunty RC.
ReplyDeleteThanks for pointing that out. Canonical appears to have changes the way they're doing this recently. Wow. I only wrote the article two weeks ago. I though I was safe. O_o.
ReplyDeleteFlashplugin-nonfree is now a transitional package pointing to the new one. Looking at the flashplugin-installer postinst file, I see:
"FLASH_VERSION=10.0.22.87
FILENAME=adobe-flashplugin_${FLASH_VERSION}.orig.tar.gz
SHA256SUM_TGZ="cf35f2cadddd5f76246e199f42502d111f7c2064c95aad1ce6f91b478a4a0e00"
PARTNER_URL=http://archive.canonical.com/pool/partner/a/adobe-flashplugin/$FILENAME"
It appears that Canonical is now hosting the Flash plugin and that the new package is downloading it. The Adobe license must not allow repackaging the installer. The good news is that:
1) There won't be anymore breackage because the package and the installer will always be in sync, and
2) Users no longer need to enable the parnter repo to get this benefit since the package is in multiverse.
My article is no longer useful, and there's still the problem of the NetworkManager bug causing the installer download to fail.
This post, while as stated above is no longer accurate, did directly lead to me solving my problem with flash, so nice going :)
ReplyDeleteTHIS IS STILL VALID - I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 9.04 yesterday and had same problem
ReplyDelete