Copia

One of the things I noticed upon upgrade to Edgy is that I'd lost Flash support in Firefox. I wish I could say that I had no need for Adobe/Macromedia's crap, but I can't. For one thing, I often make musical discoveries on MySpace pages--my musical interests tend towards the underground. I set about this evening getting Flash working again, and it was harder than I expected. Recently MySpace switched to Flash 9 (punks!) and I decided to use the version 9 beta bone that Adobe tossed to the Linux community. I found that the nonfree virtual Flash package had ben removed, so I restored it:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

The plan would be to just copy the libflashplayer.so from Flash 9 beta over the installed version 7. BTW the Flash 7 file was 2MB and the Flash 9 Beta file is almost 7MB. Might be debugging info or something, but yeesh!

Anyway, even before copying the Flash 9 beta I found that Firefox was crashing every time it loaded a Flash site. After some hunting I found a bug with Ubuntu Edgy and either version of the Flash plugin. There are several workarounds mentioned in that thread, but one of them is simply to bump up color depth to 24 bits. I hadn't even known Edgy had limited me to 16 bits, but surely enough I checked my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier      "Default Screen"
    Device          "NVIDIA Corporation NV34M [GeForce FX Go 5200]"
    Monitor         "Generic Monitor"
    DefaultDepth    16

I changed that from 16 to 24, restarted X, and all has been well since then. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, speaking of music on MySpace, here's my brother's crew, StrawHat BentLow.

...your best advice is look for the hat...

See also: "On Huck, Hip Hop, and Expression"

[Uche Ogbuji]