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Why Is Adobe Flash On Linux Still Broken?
mwilliamson writes "As I sit reading my morning paper online I still cannot view the embedded videos due to auto-detection of my Flash player not working. One in every three or four YouTube videos crashes the browser. I remember sometime back reading that Adobe has a very small development team (possibly only one) working on the Linux port of Flash. It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system. No matter how stably, smoothly, efficiently, and correctly Linux runs on a machine, the public will continue to view it as second-rate if Flash keeps crashing. This is the worst example of being tied down and bound by a crappy 3rd-party product over which no Linux distribution has any control. GNASH is nice, but it just isn't there 100%. I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."
Adopt Silverlight!
Flash (and Silverlight, et al) are a threat to the Internet generally. I wouldn't run Flash even if they bothered to create a version that runs on my OS (64-bit Linux).
The more of use that don't use Flash, the better.
So there is no version of Flash that is open source then?
The disadvantage of not being able to play Flash is mostly on sites like YouTube. But some other sites are also using Flash for the interesting content.
So the big question is - is it possible to implement a Flash player for Linux that's open source?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Are you still on Firefox 2? I had those problems but they went away with the upgrade to Firefox 3 (I'm on Ubuntu).
Flash 9.0.124.0 crashes all the time on my wife's Windows XP system running Firefox as well. Most of the time it exhibits as not being able to play sound. So it definitely isn't limited to Linux. Flash is just crap.
I used to have this happen to be on Ubuntu 8.04. I fixed it by downloading the official version of Flash from the Adobe website and replacing all of the versions of the .so on my computer. Wouldn't you know it, it worked again. I think the problem is that the version in Ubuntu 8.04 was hacked up to support PulseAudio. When I removed PulseAudio, suddenly audio didn't work anymore (in addition to, you know, the crashing all the time), but when I replaced the .so, it did again. So I recommend going to the Adobe website and getting the official version, because it does work.
I've noticed, at least since I switched from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, that when Adobe Flash Player 9 ( or 10 ) is installed the browser exhibits sporadic lockups and crashes when navigating the Web -- not just when viewing Flash video or a site that makes heavy use of Flash, although that does seem to increase the odds of the browser eating itself.
After the release of Firefox 3.0 I opted to install Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta. The performance was much better as was the video quality and I didn't experience as many crashes. This all changed when Adobe updated the Beta and the details can be found in the bug report that I filed here. To summarize, after the update, Flash Player 10 would cause the browser to segfault and lockup so frequently, sometimes even upon startup, that the browser became unusable -- I had to downgrade to Flash Player 9. Currently there is someone from Adobe assigned to work on the "problem" whatever it is, but I haven't heard anything in weeks.
jdb2
I experienced frequent Firefox crashes due to Flash in my Ubuntu box, which went being upgraded from 6.06 to 7.04 to 7.10 to 8.04. But then my hard disk crashed and I had to reinstall Ubuntu 8.04 from scratch. It's been now three months of this fresh installation, and in this period Flash has never, ever, crashed my Firefox. It's been rock solid.
My wild guess then would be that your setup is half-broken much like mine was. Try that old Windows trick of wiping your hard disk and reinstalling your Linux distribution, whatever it is. It might be the solution.
Now, this doesn't mean Flash in Linux isn't still full of bugs. It not respecting transparencies and correct depth levels in pages is a major annoyance. But at least crashing isn't part of the list anymore, at least for me.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Flash is a great channel to provide commercial products (video, ads, DRM'ed shit).
It's no threat at all when Flash isn't abused as website critical table of contents.
To comment on the OP: have you already tried the version 10 release candidate? It's supposed to support new audio API's and hardware acceleration.
They just don't care because there are no real competitors to Flash. For most mainstream sites today, Flash is mandatory. (And no amount of boycott will change that.)
I think the best way to fix this is by subversion and infiltration. Boycotts don't work. They haven't worked with Vista and won't work with Flash.
The Linux community needs to stop thinking it can "boycott" things like protocols, and file formats and instead, work to make alternate applications that can work with those file formats and protocols to eat the other guy's lunch.
I suggest the read of penguin.swf blogosplat which is Adobe's blog for posting new version of flash for linux (such as the recent Flash 10 beta or the new alpha)
You'll have Pulseaudio tell you different, but if you use a pure Alsa for your sound, you'll find Flash--and everything else that uses sound--runs MUCH better.
I have no idea why Pulseaudio has been thrust into various distributions, it's cumbersome at best, outright broken at worst. There's nothing Pulseaudio brings to the table that's needed. Application volume sliders? Anything that outputs volume already has a volume slider, why do I need another one? Sound over the network? Is this REALLY a feature people want at the expense of a huge majority of programs not working? And what's wrong with ESD for this?
So do yourself a favor, and remove all the Pulseaudio stuff from your distro.
far from the now mature process of download/click/wait/enjoy, the process involved getting just the right software version, installing it manually in the correct location, maybe hacking around with .INI files and then crossing your fingers that the mean-time-between-crashes was longer than the time it took to print your document.
So it is with installing flash on FF3/U_x64. The process basically sucks and as said, provides a sufficiently bad user experience to turn normal people off Linux for years.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."
This is an irksome statement. I doubt Adobe has an interest in making Linux look bad. Isn't there a saying, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
Probably what would work better here is, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by business sense." Linux is 4%ish of the desktop market so it would make sense that 4% (or less, but certainly not more) of Adobe flash development go to linux porting. 4% of their development just isn't going to make Flash as good as it is on other platforms, and I doubt they are receiving a lot of money from linux distros to change this.
Yeah it sucks if you use linux but no need to point a finger at Adobe. Its simple dollars and cents (or sense).
Flash doesn't work completely reliably on any platform I have tried. I find that Adobe Flash on 32bit Linux works about as well as the OS X version (meaning: it's usable but it does have occasional problems).
The main problem people are having is that there is no 64bit Linux version of Flash, so all you can do is run it in some emulated environment.
Adobe cares about the folks buying expensive site and server licenses. Those guys don't really care about you because there aren't enough of ya to have much impact on their website's success, so why should adobe invest in your platform, besides the bare minimum quality implementation as a hedge in case desktop linux becomes more important some day. There's no economic incentive.
What does it say if Adobe only has 1 employee (if that) working on the linux Flash port and he's doing a better job than GNASH and open source development?
If you really feel so strongly about Flash's importance, maybe you should help turn GNASH into a viable solution.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Linux users dont buy software. There is no revenue stream there. Plus, the user base is too small. Businesses are not charity, they aren't going to cater to a group that is more likely to pirate their goods than buy them. Sure, flash is free, but flash is used for distributing media and generating ad revenue. However, will linux users patronize advertisers? Its not likel bases on their other non-purchasing behavior.
There's various bug reports about this with regards to Pulseaudio and Flash--as well as numerous othat applications--in all major distributions that have packaged Pulseaudio by default. I'm not going to link all the bug reports in a slashdot comment, but you can search for them yourself.
The story and summary seems to be calling out Adobe on this issue, when it's not really their fault. If PA didn't have as many compatibility issues with alsa applications as it has, Flash would work fine.
It's unfair to call out Adobe on this issue. It expects a working alsa implementation, and when it has to use Pluseaudio's version of the virtual device, it crashes. Adobe doesn't have any control over the faultily implementation. So if there's a story that's about Flash crashing fine, but let's put the blame where it belongs here.
..frankly Adobe (and other major software vendors) is one of the main barriers to adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.
I'm on Mac OS Leopard and the only thing it'd take to make me move to Linux is to be able to get the Adobe, Microsoft and other suites of professional applications on Linux. That's na' ga' happen. Wouldn't be prudent for Adobe, Microsoft, et al.
And Gdammit (beta), don't tell me that GIMP is just as good as Photoshop. Just don't. It's not, just not, just so very NOT. And there are a million other reasons that the other Adobe tools rock so thoroughly more than the best creative tools you can find on Linux.
So Flash - a product from a giant software vendor that you need serious power-tools to create well (yes, I'm quite aware that the SWF spec is open) - is broken on Linux, AND you can't get the power-tools to create it. I'll shed the tiny tears for Flash (which sucks, in most cases), and the big tears for Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Fireworks (new version is gonna rock), Lightwave 3D, MS Excel, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and a hundred other tools that are must-haves within their disciplines.
Of course it's possible to implement Flash with free software, but that won't solve the problem. Free software is a powerful enough development method to overcome CSS, the Windows API, SMB, and DX. What task do you think is out of reach? The problem then is one of a legal framework that makes it impossible to distribute free software that works with broken media like DVDs and websites that use Flash. There are technical solutions but legal solutions are better. Software patents and the DMCA must go.
There are several technical solutions to broken media. One is for individuals to ignore bad laws and just get DeCSS. A better one is to code around YouTube like Clive does. You can also simply avoid non free media, after all the Internet Archive, Wikipedia and Creative Commons have multiple lifetimes worth of excellent entertainment and education. Most of these send a clear message that Flash, Silverlight and other non free media is broken. Competing technology and it's users are going to win.
Legal solutions are better. We would not have problems with broken media if people were allowed to share their solutions. Laws that prohibit people from sharing free software are always wrong and should never have passed. Modern copyright law is at odds with its purpose and must be reformed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ubuntu 8.04 and flash works just fine on x86 for me as well. Just install it from apt, don't get it from adobe.
I may be the only one here who finds this news. Although this is of course at least partially a symptom of my not caring about he iphone in general.
However, as my wife wants the iphone, I have to ask how this problem works. I thought most systems used flash for youtube - which leads me to the question of how does the iphone use youtube if it doesn't use flash?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Have some tcpdump or ngrep logs to show such behavior? Or maybe your tinfoil hat is too tight.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Probably the very low user penetration. It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system. I've been hearing that argument for years. I remember back in 1999 hearing how Linux would be ready for the desktop in 2001. Years have passed since then and it still isn't. The underlining problem is that Linux and its components create a system written by developers for developers, and it always will be. But the thing is, there's nothing wrong with that. The fun of linux is the fun of being able to tweak everything, and lets face it simple systems like Mac and Windows just aren't as fun in that way.
One in every three or four YouTube videos crashes the browser.
Of course the ideal solution would be for Adobe to fix Flash, but in the meantime you can use nspluginwrapper to prevent Firefox from crashing whenever Flash goes down. nspluginwrapper runs Flash in a separate child process from the web browser, and uses IPC to display the plugin's contents in your browser; it was originally created to allow people to use 32-bit plugins in 64-bit browsers, but this mechanism is also great for isolating the web browser from plugin crashes.
Another solution is to use Opera, which on Linux runs its plugins in an nspluginwrapper-like child process by default.
Are you so inept at fixing a pc that you think wiping the entire OS is some sort of monumental task? Is troubleshooting for 3 hours better than wiping your OS clean in 30 minutes? (you have your home directory on a separate partition, right?)
Thank you, finally someone with some sense. It's really really easy to fuck up a Linux installation if you are a twiddler, like say, add the wrong repository to your update manager and then have some beta packages installed whose version numbers are hard-coded into each other and disappear after a few hours. What fun.
Wiping windows is a pain but a necessity -everybody seems to have accepted that.
Wiping Linux is a breeze but you have to know how to properly do it to save time -fewer people seem to have gotten that far.
Separate Home partition ftw!
Flash is even broken on Windows and OSX
Maybe not as broken as you find it on Linux, but when it comes to sucking performance for no reason or doing really stupid things like cropping video when flipping to full screen video it has some rather hugh problems. (Multi-Monitors is something Adobe thinks people don't use for watching Flash Video apparently, cause it looks very untested.)
Sadly, Flash with Firefox is 10x worse than Flash with IE. After thinking I was going insane on a few new personal installs, I pulled techs to examine the Flash differences. Same sites, same Flash content, and inside Firefox it would bring the CPU to 100% and with IE not even scratch the CPU.
These are also not lemur porn quality sites, these are mainstream sites that have Flash based Ads or even MSNBC which has not moved to Silverlight.
In contrast, the new Silverlight is pretty, efficient and shiny in comparison on both Firefox and IE and even OS X. The NBC Olympic HD streaming it has been handling works better than even my Silverlight developer 'fans' expected, making Flash look problematic and more like an old dog.
i.e, remove libflashsupport, use the latest flash 10 beta and create a /etc/asound.conf as described in bug 198453
I've not had any browser crashes since doing this, so cross fingers. This is probably a very common problem..
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5587712&postcount=472. This guy has for a long time been working on getting flash working perfectly in ubuntu 8.04 and following the linked guide makes it work perfectly for me.
Poor Flash is the one major barrier? Pah - there are a number of more pressing issues, like poor wireless support...
Hardware problems are annoying, but they are fundamentally different from the problem of "critical" software being broken or unavailable. A computer manufacturer that wants to ship computers with Linux pre-loaded, instead of Windows, can pick Linux-friendly hardware to work around the hardware problems. There is no work-around for Flash being crap.
Real slashdotters use text browsers like Lynx. Graphical browsers are for sissies.
Once Firefox 3.1 comes out and includes support for playback of Theora videos and Ogg audio... I hope there will be in influx of new content published (using the more simple tags) using Theora and Ogg. Hopefully that will cause some momentum and give Flash some competition. I realize that Flash is used for a lot more than just video and audio but it is the dominant thing Linux users care to use Flash for. Of course that isn't going to cause YouTube to switch everything over to Theora / Ogg but you have to start somewhere.
Scott Dowdle
www.MontanaLinux.Org
Depends, is one trying to be productive or is one a hobbyist? I find that most of the time when I spend the time to troubleshoot the problem, I end up with some ideas as to how to avoid the problem the next time around, or how to fix it in minimal time when it does occur.
But in terms of productivity, unless it's a recurring problem, it probably is more productive to just reinstall the OS in those cases.
Well, that's assuming that one doesn't compile everything from scratch and lack backups of the packages from which to quickly reinstall them.
The original poster of this article is experiencing bugs with his or her distribution, *not* merely with Flash. There are several issues at work here.
a) Flash 10 RC is the first version to support "windowless mode" flash content that several sites use. Unfortunately, there is a bug in Firefox that causes "windowless mode" content to crash. It is not a bug caused by Adobe Flash; un fact, the newest version of swfdec (which also added support for "windowless mode" content) also causes Firefox to crash. This fix is due for release in Firefox 3.0.2 and a workaround is available for older releases already. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/239182
b) Ubuntu Hardy was the first release to integrate PulseAudio, but its default configuration can cause a lot of trouble for users. PulseAudio provides ALSA plugins that enable plain ALSA applications to work correctly with PulseAudio; these plugins are supposed to be enabled by default. Some (buggy) applications do not work correctly using these plugins, including Flash 9 and Audacity. Hardy was released without these plugin enabled, causing many audio mixing problems for users. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/198453
c) It appears the original poster is using the libflashsupport library, which is a workaround to enable PulseAudio support in Flash without the need for the ALSA plugins mentioned in point (b) to be enabled. There is a bug in Flash when using the libflashsupport API; closing and opening new flash streams will result in a crash (such as navigating from one Youtube page to another). See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/192888
d) Flash 10 has fixed its ALSA implementation, allowing it to work correctly with the PulseAudio ALSA plugins as mentioned in point (b) - this means that the (buggy) libflashsupport library is now redundant.
Note that all the above bugs contain links to the upstream issues when applicable. For those too lazy to follow the individual bugs, I have posted a guide to configure PulseAudio (and Flash 10) correctly for Ubuntu users, complete with testing packages. See: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578
ease up on the guy, he's probably had way to many years on Windows.
That's also the case, but I'm actually also a hobbyist and know my way around Linux pretty well. In fact, many time I'm in a hurry and don't even bother loading X: I do whatever I need in console mode and am done with it.
It just so happens that nowadays I work full time and go to night college, consequently having only a few hours per weekend to play around in my home box, a much different scenario than when I started figuring out Debian, back in 1997. Very pragmatic consequence: I prefer using those few hours doing useful or fun stuff rather than fixing obscure annoyances. Thus, if I can solve something in one hour by wiping sda1 and reinstalling the OS, my actual data and custom compiled software being well secured in sda3, sda4, a shelf of DVD-Rs and Amazon S3, that's exactly what I'll do.
Simply put, sometimes doing things "the right way" just isn't worth the effort.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I am not a fan of Flash, however I have not seen any problems with Flash on Linux since they ended the enormous version lag that broken some sites when Windows hd flash 8 and Linux port stopped development at 7. Flash on Linux is a massive resource eater, has idiotic installation procedure, often has to be updated because of security bugs, however it has exactly the same problems on Windows. It is more crappy and unfixable than most Linux software, however this says more about the level of quality that is considered acceptable on Windows rather than about any deficiencies specific to a Linux port.
As for Youtube, why would a Linux user want to use their flash-based player? Install latest version of clive, mplayer and xclip, and run this script after selecting or copying Youtube URL:
#!/bin/sh
cd "$HOME"
cd Desktop 2>/dev/null
xterm -bg "#ffffff" -fg "#000000" -cr "#800000" -ah -fa "DejaVu Sans Mono" -fs 14 -g 80x6 -T "Video Download" \
-e sh -c \
'xclip -o | clive "--player=mplayer -fs %i" --play=src --mask=custom'
(assign it to some panel launcher or menu in your desktop environent).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Somewhat off topic, or in an overlapping corner of the topic -
I don't run Linux anymore, only so many hours in the day, but I do a lot of Actionscript widget coding for $$$. Flash has some memory leaks that range from annoying to deal breaker. I honestly like AS 3 as I don't know Java well enough to write one man dev team internet apps and AS lets me do that. but ... If Adobe doesn't solve garbage collection and soon AJAX or (new buzzword) starts looking a lot better for low end desktop / web application development.
Hey I'll sign up to an SVG / Javascript solution if one presents itself but I've been saying that for a while.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I'm running Opera on the AMD64 port of Debian unstable and Flash works great for me. If you're having a problem, you're doing it wrong.
Maybe not
I know lots of people will smile when reading this comment but I actually report issues to Adobe, especially alpha/beta testing Flash 10. They are NOT very communicative but I see some stuff I reported has been fixed. I am also on PowerPC (still) which MS overlords decided to drop support as early as Silverlight 2.
Another issue with closed source/large company software is, they can't include "crash reporter" so they don't actually know who crashes doing what. It is problem on OS X too but at least we send them to Apple, I don't know what Apple does with them though. For that part, also thank to paranoids and conspiracy theorists. They can obviously have "crash dump" code attached and next day, you would see "Adobe spies on their Linux users!!!" type of story.
Anyway, if you know a specific site triggering crash, you better report to Adobe. Linux is _very_ important to them in light of recent developments. If they didn't care, you wouldn't see Flash 10 beta shipped for Linux.
For "Real Networks" and "Adobe", realistic companies not spoiled like Microsoft, Linux support is passport to "devices" and somehow OSX/future iPhone. Don't think they don't care.
I could flame you for suggesting to replace a 5-year old proprietary format with a 10-year old proprietary format
QuickTime follows a published international standard. If your concern is patents, what non-proprietary format were you thinking of? Ogg Theora?
I'm not trying to hide my bias - most of the work we do is in Actionscript.
But I agree as much as the next guy that making a typical website in Flash is stupid. So is unnecessary required video, low-contrast color schemes, gratuitous music, required Javascript for basic navigation, poor text-only / accessibility support, and many other things that are common on all together too many sites.
There's a bunch of reasons to use Flash, but the biggest one is that it lets you do something no other platform does - create rich, full featured, object oriented applications that just work with a wide installed user base, on a variety of platforms, with a minimum* of security risk to the user.
If you're only thinking Flash Video, you're thinking too small. Think "any application in the world that does not need direct hardware access or to maximize its access to computing resources" It runs over the web, it runs locally, and it runs the same.
Really, Flash shouldn't have this crown. Java applets should. But they don't, because of how that played out in the 90s. The behavior isn't consistent, and developing rich applications for it was tedious at best.
For the programmers reading, you don't want to develop apps in Flash, which is a super-glorified animation tool. But you want to develop in Adobe Flex, which is a wonderful tool with a for-pay IDE, but a free CLI compiler. The OUTPUT is a Flash swf, but the INPUT no longer has a binary animation file, and all of the layout supports inheritance. And the crossover is tremendous and seamless, so you can use whatever your animators/designers make in Flash in a blink.
To address some other points:
Even requiring a recent version of Flash, Flash does generally have a higher installed user base than any other single system. Obviously "HTML" per se has a higher base, but if you're doing anything modestly complex you have to break apart the major-different IE versions from everything else, and last I checked I believe Flash 9 has a higher installed base than any family of HTML rendering. I believe these stats were based on computers "active on the web" - so it doesn't count things that aren't hooked up to the internet currently, many of which presumably have old versions of IE.
Flash Player isn't as open and crossplatform as I'd like, but in general it's been getting better on both counts. Reading the comments of people who actually described there system, it seems like there's problems running Flash Player with 64bit browsers in Linux, and not with 32bit browsers...
*I didn't say NO security risk. But as platforms for running totally arbitrary third party code go, I don't know of anything that does a BETTER job.
Starting as early as 2002 Actionscript is an OOP language.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
This blog http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/ is written by one of the people working on the linux version of Flash and explains some stuff about working on Flash (somewhere in the archives is an explanation of why there is no 64 bit native Flash player yet IIRC)
From the HOWTO on the 1.0 version from the "C&C: generals" page you linked to:
4. Once the installation is done, find yourself a no-cd crack and replace the original game.dat and generals.exe with the cracked ones.
I don't consider a requirement of installing a no-cd crack as being good enough to say that a game runs in Wine (see this: "... some would advocate the use of illegally modified or "cracked" games, Wine does not support, advocate, or even view this as a solution").
However, it seems reasonable to consider the other games to be working under Wine — I haven't run Oblivion myself, but RA2 and Starcraft run fine (although I do occasionally have issues with RA2 on a slow computer).
Ask me about repetitive DNA