Fix for Karmic Koala 64-bit Flash Plugin

I upgraded my laptop to the 64-bit Ubuntu Karmic Koala beta yesterday. For me, Flash was very broken…

The 32-bit Plugin

Ubuntu defaults to installing the 32-bit Adobe Flash plugin and runs it under nspluginwrapper. When I run the plugin this way it will not accept mouse clicks properly. This seems to be a known issue. The bug reports make it sound like disabling compiz fixes this… I don't run compiz, I run the Sawfish window manager. I tested Metacity and it works just fine.

The 64-bit Plugin

Next I tried disabling the 32-bit plugin so that it would use the 64 bit plugin that I already had installed in my .mozilla directory. Mouse clicks worked… Unfortunately, it was crashing constantly. I couldn't even load gmail without crashing Firefox.

Is it Firefox's Fault?

I have both Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 installed. Both were just as crash happy. I was hoping it would be as simple as blaming Firefox 3.5…

Firefox in a Jaunty chroot

I had a 64-bit Jaunty chroot environment already sitting on my hard drive. It only took a few commands and a little waiting before I had Firefox and the 64 bit Flash plugin from Adobe installed in the chroot. It ran perfectly.

I compared the output of ldd libflashplayer.so from inside and outside the chroot. One extra library was showing up in the chroot, libresolv.so.2.