In the hopes of helping someone else…  Ubuntu has two options for a plugin for Firefox to play Flash. There’s the open-source Gnash and “the real thing” from Adobe. Of course what Adobe provides is closed-source, so there seems to be a tendency to push Gnash. But having used Gnash, it’s awful. I give them enormous credit for their work, but when I have a load average of 2.5 playing a 2-minute YouTube video, get lots and lots of dropped frames, and have random 0’s (a big ‘zero’) superimposed over the video, it’s alpha-level code. It’s not usable.

In theory, Ubuntu makes it easy to install the proprietary one, too. They can’t distribute the player itself, per Adobe’s license terms. So they have a package, flashplugin-nonfree, which downloads it from Adobe. The problem is that Adobe updated their version, so the script fails, citing an MD5 mismatch. (The file’s signature has changed, since it’s, you know, a different version.) Worst of all, it doesn’t handle this error appropriately: it tells you that the package installed successfully, when, in actuality, it aborts due to the error.

This happened in early December. The Ubuntu developers have been squabbling, yet to release an update: apparently the new version doesn’t work in Konquerer. As one person on the developers’ list points out, status quo is the worst case: Flash doesn’t work for anyone. But the developers seem unwilling to use a simple patch to handle the new version, because then Konqueror wouldn’t work. So some grandiose task is under way to try to integrate it with Konqueror, apparently. Meanwhile, no one can use Ubuntu’s package manager to install Flash player.

Fortunately, it’s easy to do yourself. Download the .tar.gz file here, and extract it somewhere. Pull up a terminal, go into the extracted directory, and type “sudo flashplayer-installer,” and follow the on-screen instructions. It’ll take about fifteen seconds. When asked for the location, you probably want /usr/lib/firefox (assuming you use Firefox, and are on Gutsy). You have to close your browser to do this.