How to fix unresponsive Flash player on Ubuntu

Ryan — Sat, 15 May 2010 15:40:28 +0000

For a long while going back to Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10, and even the latest 10.4 lucid, there has been a nagging issue with the Adobe Flash player being unresponsive to mouse clicks. This bug stops you from interacting with Flash buttons or controls for example those in video players or games which is obviously very frustrating. Being such a high profile issue which affects many users it’s amazing that it has taken this long come up with a fix.

Here is the official bug on launchpad which concerns the flashplugin-nonfree package and mentions a couple workarounds.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/410407

So here is the bug and workarounds.

For example on youtube, whilst it recognises my mouse moving over various buttons, actual mouse clicks are not recognised. I can navigate using ‘tab’ but this is very painful. I can also right click. The problem doesn’t occur with other flash players, e.g. swfdec-mozilla.

WORKAROUND 1: Disable compiz
WORKAROUND 2: Remove flashplugin-nonfree / flashplugin-installer and install from adobe
WORKAROUND 3: Open a terminal and enter:

gksudo gedit /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer

Then add: export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 before the last line of text

Note: Chrome & Chromium are now working fine without workaround

These workaround’s have been verified to work for some users. We don’t need verification of whether or not they work for you.

To my knowledge it is still unclear what the underlying cause of this issue really is. But these workarounds are your best shot at resolving the issue until an official fix is released. The last workaround is the easiest and has the least impact on your system so I would give that a try first, it worked for myself.

Install Boxee on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic

Ryan — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:33:12 +0000

Installing Boxee turns your computer into an incredible HTPC. These instructions will help you get it up and running on Ubuntu.

Update:
Boxee has recently made the latest version (9.20) of their software available for Ubuntu 64 and 32-bit. If you are installing this new version simply download the deb package off their website directly and install it.

The instructions below pertain to older Boxee versions < 9.20

Start by downloading the repository off the website. Since the 32-bit repository is the only one available simply adding it to your sources.list will not work.

$ wget http://apt.boxee.tv/dists/jaunty/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz

Find the latest version of Boxee in the repository.

$ zcat Packages.gz | grep Filename

Filename: ./dists/intrepid/main/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.6.4578.intrepid.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/main/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.7.4826.intrepid.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.11.5777.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.12.6570.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.13.6684.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.14.6795.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.14.6992.deb

Download the latest version.

$ wget http://apt.boxee.tv/dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.14.6992.deb

Install the package, since your system is 64-bit and you are installing a 32-bit package you will see that your system is missing some required libraries.

$ sudo dpkg -i --force-all boxee-0.9.14.6992.deb

dpkg: warning: overriding problem because --force enabled:
 package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)
Selecting previously deselected package boxee.
(Reading database ... 144498 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking boxee (from boxee-0.9.14.6992.deb) ...
dpkg: boxee: dependency problems, but configuring anyway as you requested:
 boxee depends on liblzo1; however:
  Package liblzo1 is not installed.
 boxee depends on libfaad-dev; however:
  Package libfaad-dev is not installed.
 boxee depends on libxmlrpc-c3; however:
  Package libxmlrpc-c3 is not installed.
 boxee depends on libdirectfb-1.0-0; however:
  Package libdirectfb-1.0-0 is not installed.
 boxee depends on libkrb53; however:
  Package libkrb53 is not installed.
 boxee depends on xsel; however:
  Package xsel is not installed.
Setting up boxee (0.9.14.6992)

To fix these dependency problems download the getlibs package and install it.

$ wget http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/getlibs-all.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb

Now resolve those missing libraries.

$ getlibs /opt/boxee/Boxee

libfaac.so.0: libfaac0
libhal-storage.so.1: libhal-storage1
libjasper.so.1: libjasper1
libenca.so.0: libenca0
No match for liblzo.so.1
libmysqlclient.so.15: libmysqlclient15off
libfribidi.so.0: libfribidi0
libGLEW.so.1.5: libglew1.5
The following i386 packages will be installed:
libenca0
libfaac0
libfribidi0
libglew1.5
libhal-storage1
libjasper1
libmysqlclient15off
Continue [Y/n]? y
Downloading ...
Installing libraries ...

Install the lib32nss-mdns library.

$ sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns

You also need to manually install the liblzo library which is no longer available in the 9.10 release.

$ wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/l/lzo/liblzo1_1.08-3_i386.deb
$ getlibs -i liblzo1_1.08-3_i386.deb

You should now be able to launch Boxee normally, enjoy!

WiredRevolution.com » 9.04

How to fix unresponsive Flash player on Ubuntu

Install Boxee on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic