I had some difficulties playing Flash videos lately. Problems ranged from lagging sound, to ugliness, to idling black screens, to strange gray Play buttons that didn't do anything. The following solved my Flash issues on Ubuntu.

A very short & simple article this time.

You could take the graphical approach (use Synaptic & visit Adobe site), but I'm using commandline cause copy-pasting is really fast and concise, so here we go:

Cleanup

Open a terminal and type:

sudo echo -n "Cleaning up... "
sudo aptitude purge swfdec-mozilla
sudo aptitude purge adobe-flashplugin
sudo echo "[done]"

Install Adobe Flashplayer 10 on Ubuntu

Open a terminal and type:

sudo echo -n "Downloading... "
cd /tmp
wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_10_linux.deb
sudo echo "[done]"
sudo echo -n "Installing... "
sudo aptitude install libcurl3
sudo dpkg -i ./install_flash_player_10_linux.deb
sudo echo "[done]"

That's it

Restart Firefox and go & enjoy some Youtube videos again : )

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tags: ubuntu, flash, video, flv
category: Howto - Desktop
read: 5,930 times

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Comments

#9. Mehdi on 11 March 2010

Hi,

I am using Ubuntu 9.10 and going to watch flash files of below web site but I couldn't. In addition, the colors are not real in skype and youtube.

Would you please help me?
... [more]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/lj/intros/

Thanks,

Mehdi

#8. Kevin on 21 February 2010

Glad it works out for you guys!

#7. Marion on 07 February 2010

I am very glad now it work the Flashplugin on Ubuntu 8.10 perfect. Thanks a lot !!!

#6. MIke on 04 February 2010

Thanks you very much, your solution fix my case

#5. Matthew on 13 December 2009

Thanks man, I was having problems getting flash to work for any extending period of time. Thanks for your solution, its working great!

#4. Enzo on 08 June 2009

Dude, thank you! This has been bothering me since I've changed my hard drive. I was beginning to think it was faulty hardware.

Thanks again

-Enzo

#3. Sam on 30 May 2009

Nice solution... works great! (Ubuntu 9.04)

#2. Kevin on 22 May 2009

@ gavin: Personally I already had that package installed but I'll update the article as this may happen to others as well. Thanks for sharing!

#1. gavin on 21 May 2009

Worked, aside from one speedbump:

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of adobe-flashplugin:
 adobe-flashplugin depends on libcurl3; however:
  Package libcurl3 is not installed.
dpkg: error processing adobe-flashplugin (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 adobe-flashplugin

I did `sudo apt-get install libcurl3`, then `sudo dpkg -i ./install_flash_player_10_linux.deb`