Planet Geek

Grrr du jour, KDE + Flash = FAIL!

Geekitude

Well doesn't that just frost your fingernails.

This morning an update came down the pike from the Ubuntu distribution that updated the Adobe Flash (nonfree) plugin, a plugin I use primarily in Konqueror. While it's nice that Adobe is actively supporting the Linux community, this morning's screwup makes me grit my teeth and take another long look at the rabbithole.

The new flash player is incompatible with the the Gutsy Gibbon (aka Ubuntu 7.10, aka 'stable') version of Konqueror. When you try to view any flash content, it the plugin crashes with a SIGSEGV fault.

Some whining on the #KDE support channel pointed me to a workaround using the KMPlayer tool, but after attempting a build under Gutsy, I realized that this patch will only work on Hardy Heron (the next 'unstable' release of Ubuntu).

Which I'm not running.

So, as it stands now, I have no flash player under Konqueror. I can start Firefox and use that, but I've been avoiding that as much as possible. So in some ways, yeah, I -can- view flash content. But I don't like it.

As far as I know, there is no fix for this problem, at least until Hardy Heron goes into wide release.

I am grumpy.

UPDATE 2/11/2008 - The folks at Ubuntu have been redeemed! A patch was released that updated much of KDE, and included a fix for the embedded flash player in Konqueror. We're back to using the Netscape plugin properly. Hooray!

Posted by dbs at February 8, 2008 10:59 AM