Flash Player 9: Experimental PulseAudio support

Update: Please note that there's now a newer implementation of libflashsupport.so available from the PulseAudio developers: gitweb, git-clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/libflashsupport.git/. Please make sure to use this version for better results.

This page describes how to solve the Flash Player 9 problem by building and installing an experimental plugin, libflashsupport.so, which adds support for ESD and PulseAudio.

This guide is aimed at non-technical users of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon (and previous Ubuntu releases) or other Debian-based distributions.

Installation

Make sure you have the following packages installed, additional to PulseAudio

build-essential
automake1.9
autoconf
libtool
libesd0-dev
libpulse-dev
libssl-dev

Start a terminal and run this command:

sudo aptitude install build-essential automake1.9 autoconf libtool libesd0-dev libpulse-dev libssl-dev

(You can start the terminal by pressing Alt+F2 and typing gnome-terminal or x-terminal-emulator)

Download source

To compile the plugin, you need to get the latest version using git clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/libflashsupport.git/

Compiling and installing

In a terminal, go into the directory you moved the downloaded files into and:

cd libflashsupport

Ubuntu 7.10 ships with libpulse 0.9.6 while the current (7 feb 2008) configure script requires at least version 0.9.7. Edit the configure.ac file and change in the line

PKG_CHECK_MODULES(PULSE, [ libpulse >= 0.9.7 ])

the version number to 0.9.6 and follow the rest of the instructions. This did the trick for me.

Now compile the plugin:

./bootstrap.sh
make
sudo make install

(Note that it cannot be installed in /usr/local as flash won't find it there)

Hopefully it should all go well. Restart Firefox and check if it works.

If something goes wrong (like Firefox crashes), this is how to uninstall it again:

Uninstalling

Close all instances of Firefox (or anything that uses Flash).

Open a terminal and run this command:

sudo rm /usr/lib/libflashsupport.*

The plugin is now removed.