Lucid Lynx Flash update today not working. Version 11.2.202

**ortermagic** · April 6th, 2012

AJ
I have a funny feeling that I have completely removed the file at some point over the last week...To blindly go...
Any way this is theresult of running ...
locate libflashplayer.so

fairy@fairy-K7S41GX:~$ locate libflashplayer.so
/home/fairy/libflashplayer.so
/home/fairy/Downloads/install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so
/home/fairy/flash problem/install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so
/home/fairy/usr/lib/kde4/libflashplayer.so
fairy@fairy-K7S41GX:~$

I appear to have several instances of /libflashplayer.so onboard...I think thats because I set up a folder inhome to hold all the bits and peices of flashas I collect them...Sorry to be making such a stroganov of this ...It's a bit embarrassing tbh

**r.stiltskin** · April 7th, 2012

@ortermagic:
Looking back over your posts, it seems that you are working on a Maverick system. I mistakenly thought you were asking about Lucid, so I'm not sure that this will work for you. It seems that Ubuntu support for Maverick has expired, so you should probably upgrade the entire system, or you might want to wait till the end of the month when 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) is released.

For what it's worth, Flash 11.2.202.228 works fine on my 64-bit Oneiric system.

I'll leave this here for any 10.04 LTS (Lucid) users who lost all Flash functionality after the update.

You don't seem to have any copies of flash anyplace in your /usr directory, so it seems that for some reason none of your attempts have resulted in a proper installation. I don't think any of those copies scattered around in your /home directory are a problem. My only concern is that I don't know anything about flash-aid and it seems to have tried to install flash in /usr/lib/kde4 which is a non-standard location for it, in ubuntu 10.04 at least. And yet that somehow ended up in your home directory too, so I'm wondering if there's a link somewhere that we haven't detected that may be pointing to that ...

Anyway here's my advice. I can't guarantee that it will work because some of your other attempts may have left behind some garbage that this won't clean up. But this won't break your system. At worst, you'll end up still without flash -- but that's no worse than where you are now. It won't hurt anything else. I can tell you that this worked perfectly on my 10.04 LTS machine.

First maybe you should remove, or at least disable, flash-aid. I don't know what it does, it's not a standard Ubuntu thing and I don't see why you need it. After this process is finished (assuming it's successful) you don't want to be making any further changes to the flash plugin anyway. So (in Firefox) go to Tools/Add-ons/Plugins, find flash-aid and click disable. Then quit and restart Firefox.

(Apologies to the flash-aid developers. I just don't like turning my baby over to a "wizard"; I'd rather run a few simple commands and know exactly what's being done to my system.)

Then:
1.
go to this link (that's the same link that philinux posted earlier) http://ubuntu.wbac.ac.th/archive-can...ucid1_i386.deb and save that file to your Desktop.

2.
Open a terminal window. The remaining steps will all be done at the command line.

3.
Run this command

Code:

sudo apt-get purge flashplugin-installer

That should get rid of anything remaining from the non-working flashplugin version 11.2...

4.
Run this command

Code:

sudo apt-get purge adobe-flashplugin

That will probably do nothing because I don't think you've ever installed that package, but run it just in case. It can't hurt anything.

5.
Next command:

Code:

sudo cp ~/Desktop/adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63* /var/cache/apt/archives/

That will save a copy of the .deb file that you just downloaded in your apt archives.

6.
Now we install it:

Code:

sudo gdebi /var/cache/apt/archives/adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63*

At this point, you should have a working flash plugin. I'm not sure, you might have to restart Firefox again to get it to use the new plugin.

7.
Now, we "lock" this version, so your package manager doesn't come along next week and "helpfully" replace it with another non-working update.

Code:

echo "adobe-flashplugin hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections

Note there's that vertical bar again in the middle of the command line.

8.
Finally, now that flash is working again (hopefully), you can delete all the various copies of it that are scattered around in your home directory -- all the ones listed in post #71, and the new one we just downloaded to your Desktop. Leave the one that we copied to /var/cache/apt/archive. That's all you need.

Good luck.

**lovinglinux** · April 7th, 2012

Originally Posted by r.stiltskin

My only concern is that I don't know anything about flash-aid and it seems to have tried to install flash in /usr/lib/kde4 which is a non-standard location for it, in ubuntu 10.04 at least. And yet that somehow ended up in your home directory too, so I'm wondering if there's a link somewhere that we haven't detected that may be pointing to that ...

I know about Flash-Aid, because I am the developer. It is a script generator that helps to remove conflicting plugins, install flash from various sources and apply some performance tweaks. It has been developed for 2 years, has 33.000 daily users and a 5 star review on AMO. It is not a standard Ubuntu application, but it does help a lot of people solve their flash problems.

Flash-Aid certainly didn't put any files on /usr/lib/kde4 or the home directory.

Originally Posted by r.stiltskin

Anyway here's my advice. I can't guarantee that it will work because some of your other attempts may have left behind some garbage that this won't clean up. But this won't break your system. At worst, you'll end up still without flash -- but that's no worse than where you are now. It won't hurt anything else. I can tell you that this worked perfectly on my 10.04 LTS machine.

Flash-Aid does cleanup "garbage" plugins installed on several locations, to avoid conflicts.

Originally Posted by r.stiltskin

First maybe you should remove, or at least disable, flash-aid. I don't know what it does, it's not a standard Ubuntu thing and I don't see why you need it. After this process is finished (assuming it's successful) you don't want to be making any further changes to the flash plugin anyway. So (in Firefox) go to Tools/Add-ons/Plugins, find flash-aid and click disable. Then quit and restart Firefox.

Flash-Aid doesn't do anything until you interact with it, by running the Wizard or the other installation modes, so removing it or disabling it won't make any difference.

You don't know what Flash-Aid does, but it is exactly what you need to fix a mess like this.

**lovinglinux** · April 7th, 2012

Originally Posted by ortermagic

Hi lovinglinux here's the help report,

Your report shows me that you have properly installed flashpliun-installer form the repos, but that won't solve the SMURF effect.

HEre are the instructions on how to remove the installed plugin and install version 11.1.102.63 using Flash-Aid.

Get the flash player 11.1.102.63 pack from Adobe. Extract the archive, find the tar.gz file corresponding to your architecture and copy it (don't extract it). Open Flash-Aid Advanced mode, select "Custom" in the installation option, paste the tar.gz path in the field. Click the Script tab, then Execute. Flash-Aid will remove all installed flash versions and install the one from the tar.gz file in the proper location.

In addition to the instructions above, I recommend removing the remaining downloaded flash files from your home. Flash-Aid won't detect that location, so you need to do it manually, with these commands:

Code:

rm /home/fairy/libflashplayer.so
rm /home/fairy/Downloads/install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so
rm /home/fairy/flash problem/install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so
rm /home/fairy/usr/lib/kde4/libflashplayer.so

Keep in mind that is probably not safe to use version 11.1.102.63, so at least make sure to block flash with NoScript extension and only allow trusted sites.

**BobSongs** · April 7th, 2012

My report on Flash-Aid and the Flash player in general:

I followed the instructions given and removed all installed copies of Adobe-*. Tested the result by opening Youtube in Firefox: no videos would run. Done.

Installed Flash-Aid on 11.10 Ubuntu 32-bit using the default desktop. Used:

- Tools > Flash-Aid > Quick Mode > Install stable Flash

Followed through with password and restart.

Results:
Pros: Youtube videos played correctly (no more blue human skin).
Cons: When scrolling the Youtube page up and down with my mouse wheel, the Flashplayer crashed displaying sad-looking Lego-type block. Pausing the video and restarting resulted in another crash. Clicking the video ahead or behind the play point caused yet another crash. At other times the player simply crashed without provocation.

Next Step
Opened Synaptic Package Manager to remove all Adobe references (adobe-flashplugin, adobe-flash-properties-gtk) and tried various other methods from the Flash-Aid menu. All other methods failed claiming a 404 error. Removed Flash-Aid from my plug-ins.

Read through this thread. Found the link to
http://ubuntu.wbac.ac.th/archive-can...lugin/?C=M;O=D
Downloaded adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63-0oneiric1_i386.deb & adobe-flash-properties-gtk_11.1.102.63-0oneiric1_i386.deb and installed these two files using dpkg.

Results:
Pros: The Flash player at the Youtube site no longer crashed when scrolling the page.
Cons: The player's image would freeze (sound worked though) if the video was forced to play at different points in the time line when already playing.

SUCCESSFUL SOLUTION:
Followed the advice listed as a bandaid solution here. Placed a copy of libflashplayer.so in /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer

Results:
Pros: The Flash player at the Youtube site no longer crashes, no longer has difficulties when jumping through the video's time line.
Cons: Wasted too much time trying other solutions.

**ortermagic** · April 7th, 2012

@r.stiltskin
Thank you for posting that solution, or possible solution to my problem. I have followed your instructions.
The unfortunate result I get is as follows...

fairy@fairy-K7S41GX:~$ sudo apt-get purge flashplugin-installer
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package flashplugin-installer is not installed, so not removed
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
fairy@fairy-K7S41GX:~$ sudo apt-get purge adobe-flashplugin
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package adobe-flashplugin is not installed, so not removed
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
fairy@fairy-K7S41GX:~$ sudo cp ~/Desktop/adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63* /var/cache/apt/archives/
fairy@fairy-K7S41GX:~$ sudo gdebi /var/cache/apt/archives/adobe-flashplugin_11.1.102.63*
sudo: gdebi: command not found
fairy@fairy-K7S41GX:~$

There is something amiss with the sudo: gdebi command ... do you know why it stalls at this point?

**ortermagic** · April 7th, 2012

Dear r.stiltskin
this is a happy post...thank you for leading me to a solution to a problem that has been bugging me for two weeks.
How did I do it? after trying to install using the terminal unsuccessfully and posting the above query re- "sudo: gdebi: command not found" I right clicked on the desktop file you pointed me towards and noticed that I had an option to open it using the software centre, so I tried it ...and it worked! Yippee!

I will now have to study using terminal commands to hopefully clear out the fog in my brain.
I guess I will have to discover how to pin the thing in, so that any future upgrades will leave it alone.

I'm sorry lovinglinux but your app did not work for me? don't know why, I tried every which way to to get it going, but failed every time.
Nevertheless thank you so much for all your help, I really appreciate it.
I don't know if I am allowed to do this but I feel the need to add a little musical link here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-zgB...eature=related
Thanks everyone! Any relevant advice will always be appreciated
Roger

**Trapper** · April 7th, 2012

I had this flash problem after updating to 228 on one of my machines but not another. I took the hard drive from the computer it worked on and put it in the other machine and booted up. Flash would not work on that box. I moved it back to the original box and it did work again. So, this almost has to be hardware specific. Totally different hardware on my 2 machines.

My fix was as others have done and copied over my 228 libflashplayer.so with the 11.1.102.55 libflashplayer.so

ALSO !!!! .... do a full search of your home .mozilla folder for libflashplayer.so and delete any you find.

I found 11.1.102.55 .tar.gz to extract libflashplayer.so from here: http://www.techspot.com/downloads/51...for-linux.html

**Trapper** · April 7th, 2012

Another thought on why some are experiencing problems with 228 and others are not. My problems all seem to be on machines with 32 bit processors. It would be interesting to know if it's 32 bit specific. For me, personally, it is only affecting my older 32 bit machines. Even 64 bit machines running 32 bit don't seem to be affected.

This also does not seem to be a 10.04 specific problem. I have the same problem on the plagued 32 bit machines with 11.10 and 12.04.