I’m generally not on the lookout for flash content on the Web, but after upgrading to KDE SC 4.5 I was forced to take notice.
The upgrade went very well and I love the new KDE release. It’s packed with new features, is more stable and performs better than the previous version, and the option of using Webkit as a rendering engine for Konqueror (this post) is awesome.
Unfortunately there’s a nasty bug in Konqueror that seems to crash it when a flash plugin is loaded. Eg visiting skype.com would crash the browser when the flash video loads. I haven’t tested it with KHTML as I’m too addicted to browsing with Webkit.
Anyway, I then turned my attention to using firefox and naively assumed flash was working in Lucid as it had in previous versions of Ubuntu. The result? Of course it wasn’t.
The adobe flash package is there, the plugin file was there, but no flash functionality. I found the fix on the Ubuntu forums:
# ln -s /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so .mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
That link was the difference between the user experience of flash working or not. For the average user that is a big deal.
Is anyone able to explain why such simple regressions still slip through Ubuntu’s cracks?
