flash plugin in Ubuntu 10.04 w/ Build 6336

flash plugin in Ubuntu 10.04 w/ Build 6336

I had Opera 10.53 build 6333 installed in Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit (a fresh install, not an upgrade from 9.10), but flash wasn't working in Opera. Any time that I tried to load up a flash app (Last.fm in this case), the flash container would stay blank, and my dmesg would get spammed with a bunch of lines like:

[timestamp] operapluginwrap[23805]: segfault at 0 ip (null) sp (64-bit address) error 14 in operapluginwrapper-native[400000+2e000]

I upgraded to build 6336 and still had the same issue. When I checked about:plugins, I noticed that it listed both flashplugin-alternative.so (from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/), and also /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so. flashplugin-alternative.so was listed before libflashplayer.so, so I figured maybe Opera was trying to run the wrong flash plugin.

I moved the symbolic link to flashplugin-alternative.so to its parent directory, restarted opera, and now things are working fine.

First question: Is this something that other people running Ubuntu (or maybe just 64-bit) are running into?
Second Question: Is this a known issue?
Third: Should this be reported as a bug, or has someone already done it?

Yes, yes, and yes.

See http://my.opera.com/ruario/blog/problems-with-nspluginwrapper-and-flash-on-64bit

Thanks for the reply. I moved flashplugin-alternative.so back to its original location, created a plugin-ignore.ini, and configured opera's plugin ignore file path. Restarted Opera, and things are working that way (and there's less chance that I've broken anything else).

I don't think anything breaks from removing the flashplugin-alternative.so symlink. At least I've been running without it for over a year and Flash works in all my browsers.

The problem is that recently there is a push to use the open source gnash plugin. The idea is good, but the problem is:
1. The open source plugin doesnt work many times.
2. The open source plugin interferes with the proprietary flash plugin.
Removing mozilla-plugin-gnash package will help, but sometimes a link still remains in the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins folder - remove it if it is still there.
You can try removing the gnash package too, but in my experience that is deeply rooted in the gnome dependency system so it might create problems.