Enabling Flash in Chrome on Ubuntu 10.04

      by Wyatt Walter

Update: The same steps seem to work on Ubuntu 11.04 as well.

Another update (10/24/2011): The same seems to work as well for 11.10. “Virtue” hints that the path may have changed to /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for me.

Hello again there, world. I’ve been away from my computer for a little while now as I relocated to Silicon Valley, but I got a chance to play around with one of the Alpha’s of Ubuntu 10.04 this weekend. The new version has some vast improvements in the looks over the last one as well as now it includes Google Chrome in the default repository. When I wanted to setup Flash for Chrome, I followed a handy how-to, but this one didn’t account for the fact that Chrome was installed via the regular repositories and wasn’t installed to /opt.

To install, I simply had to follow the step-by-step with a few modifications:

  1. Install Chrome and Flash (with the Ubuntu Software Center or with apt-get

    2. sudo apt-get install chromium-browser flashplugin-nonfree

  2. Add the Flash plugin to the Chrome plugins directory

    3. sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/

  3. Restart Chrome

That’s it. While a bit annoying that one has to install Flash for Chrome this way (especially considering YouTube – another Google product – relies on Flash), but it’s not too painful.

If you still run into problems, you can double-check the location of the file (using locate libflashplayer.so) needed and the location where Chrome is installed (using whereis chromium-browser).

If you’ve just installed Ubuntu 10.04 and came across this, you may also want to install the browser Java plugin as well.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (23) : Mar 15th, 2010

  • Nicolas Perrault

    Thanks my friend!

    Works perfect for me. Two thumbs up!

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  • http://www.rommellaranjo.com Rommel

    Nice article!

    In my case, I only installed the 64bit flash plugin once and it works like wonder on both firefox and chrome. :)

    Here’s how I did it.

  • Phil

    Works perfectly. Thanks a bunch!!

  • Brian

    This method doesn’t work if you download and install chrome using the .deb package provided by Google. Any suggestions? :)

    • http://whatan00b.com Wyatt Walter

      @Brian – The method should work, but the paths will be a bit different. Do you know what path Chrome got installed to?

  • mediaseth

    Thanks. A friend pointed me here to get flash working in Chrome after I couldn’t get it to work in Firefox. However, I still get “An error occurred, please try again later.” in either browser. I’m at a total loss since every supposed fix posted online seems to fail. :(

    • http://whatan00b.com Wyatt Walter

      @mediaseth Hmm yeah, if it didn’t work in Firefox to begin with, it’s probably not going to work in Chrome. What method did you use to install Firefox and Flash? Does the file /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so exist?

  • mediaseth

    Well, things “broke” when I upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu. I didn’t do a fresh install. Previous to that, I could view flash in Firefox.

    Here’s a weird thing: I can view videos from youtube that have been embedded into blogs and such. They just don’t seem to work on youtube, itself.

    libflashplayer.so does exist..

  • Jebril

    Am I the only one who had Chrome working with Flash out of box?

    I found it very odd, my main problem is I can’t get Java to work on Chrome so I have to use Firefox.

  • AJ

    Well I don’t know about using this to install flash in Chrome, since my installation of Chrome doesn’t seem to have a plugins folder. Instead, I just used these directions to install Chromium and I started using it instead! It works awesome. :-D

    Are there any drawbacks to using Chromium instead of Chrome?

  • xerks

    Perfect.
    best solution found online. Fats and simple…

  • Peter

    Worked like a charm! Thank you!

  • Rene

    Fellow Ubuntu users:

    If you’ve got google-chrome instead of chromium-browser, you probably have it in the path:

    /opt/google/chrome/

    – or search where is it with

    whereis google-chrome

    So, copy /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so to that path and that’s all!!!

    Thanks to Wyatt Walter for the tip; it did work nicely! :)

  • João Rodrigues

    I just installed thin in ubuntu netbook remix 10.04 (on an AcerOne 110L).

    I soft-linked instead of copying, despite having read against it somewhere else.

    Seems to work fine. At least http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/
    reports the latest version.

    Thanks.

  • apis17

    this works. thank you. :)

  • othniel

    This works!!!! thanks man, i been trying these past 3 days, and stumble on your blog. awesome!!!!!

  • taltamir

    I found out the hard way, after many trials, that trying to install that library on Kubuntu 11.04 using KpackageKit does not work. The solution is to use KPK to uninstall flash plugin nonfree, then use the terminal to install it.

  • Max

    I tried this on Ubuntu 11.04 and have run into a problem.

    max@ubuntu: sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/
    cp: cannot stat `/usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so’: No such file or directory

    any advice? I’m pretty new, so keep it simple for me if you can

    • Virture

      I know it’s a bit late but the the new code is

      sudo cp /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/

      Because the folder flashplugin-installer has changed to adobe-flashplugin.

      Hope that helps:)

  • http://blogkoning.nl/ Dempsey

    Nice,
    However:
    You mention Google Chrome but you are using Chromium. This may look as the same browser but it really isn’t.
    Chromium is the opensource browser available on google code and Google Chrome is the one that Google distributes itself.
    Chromium and Chrome are like how Sun StarOffice and the current known OpenOffice were.
    OpenSource and Closed Source versions :)
    Or like the OpenSuse and Suse Enterprise versions.

    This is the reason that you have the package google-chrome and chromium-browser :)

  • Sophronis Neophytou

    man thanks a lot it worked flawlessly!

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