So, my recent insomnia has prompted me to do some work to improve my computer! Yesterday, I decided that Firefox (2.0.0.2) was out of date, so I decided to update it to the latest version (2.0.0.4). Not a major update, but something that I had been meaning to do for a while now. I tinkered with it for a while, but still, Flash wasn't playing correctly. I had downloaded version 9 ages ago, but the system was still utilizing version 7 for YouTube and other sites, half the time, not being able to output sound, the other half, it would either not work at all or send the fox up to 100% CPU and crash it.
~sigh, too much trouble to fix... Unless you are an insomniac for the week! Instead of reading through forum post after post, I decided to tinker with it myself to see what conclusions I could come up with. Well, I found a solution... In the directory
/opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/plugins, there was one .so file (libnullplugin.so) and one link to an .so file (libjavaplugin_oji.so). I knew this wasn't the correct directory or the proper place for plugins, but if Firefox states in "about:plugins" that those two plugins are installed and running correctly, then if I copy the .so (libflashplayer.so) from /usr/lib/flash-plugin/, then it may just work.And it does! I was totally surprised that I was able to upgrade flash so easily after all this time. For 18 months now or so, I haven't been able to get flash to work the way I wanted it to, and after the change-over from Macromedia Corp to Adobe, the updates haven't quite worked the way I've wanted them to. And while I would have prefered a pointed to the file, or a conf file adjustment to get the correct result, I'm just happy that Firefox can play flash files with audio and without crashing or freezing! Swankin'.
