Enabling Flash in Chrome on Ubuntu 10.04
by Wyatt WalterHello 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:
- Install Chrome and Flash (with the Ubuntu Software Center or with apt-get
- Add the Flash plugin to the Chrome plugins directory
- Restart Chrome
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser flashplugin-nonfree
sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/
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.
Tags: chrome, flash, linux, ubuntu
Filed under How-Tos / Tips :
Comments (11) :
Mar 15th, 2010
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March 28th, 2010 at 8:49 am
Thanks my friend!
Works perfect for me. Two thumbs up!
April 29th, 2010 at 7:08 am
[...] the app setup is good, there’s a few things I added from the start. Adding Flash and Google Chrome is easy enough, and with the Adblock for Chrome Extension it’s an even faster and [...]
May 14th, 2010 at 5:05 am
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.
May 22nd, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Works perfectly. Thanks a bunch!!
June 29th, 2010 at 7:39 am
This method doesn’t work if you download and install chrome using the .deb package provided by Google. Any suggestions?
July 6th, 2010 at 11:15 am
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.
July 6th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
@Brian – The method should work, but the paths will be a bit different. Do you know what path Chrome got installed to?
July 6th, 2010 at 5:00 pm
@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?
July 7th, 2010 at 9:13 am
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..
July 18th, 2010 at 6:13 am
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.
August 8th, 2010 at 7:40 am
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.
Are there any drawbacks to using Chromium instead of Chrome?