Ubuntu 10.04/Flash Video

Now that Ubuntu 10.04 (Desktop version) is past the LTS period, I'm stumbling across more issues that I have to solve "manually". A particularly perplexing one lately was the inability to play flash videos from within ANY browser (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Chromium). I googled & regoogled, & tried everything I found, some of them recommending complex reinstallation procedures.

In the end, it was a relatively simple fix. Of course, YMMV.

You'll need to download the adobe flash plugin debian package file

You only need one file from the package, which is libflashplayer.so.

To extract the file, you'll need to run the following commands:

$ ar -xv adobe-flashplugin_11.2.202.236-no-sse2.deb
$ tar xvzf data.tar.gz
$ mv usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/

You may or may not need to create the directory in the last step above.

See the full thread and original post.

The OP recommends removing the flashplugin and gnash before doing this, but I skipped that and I haven't had any issues so far.