Seg Faults with Firefox and Adobe Flash Player 9
I updated Adobe Flash Player to version 9 last week on my lovely little Thinkpad X21 running Ubuntu Breezy but was disappointed to find Firefox crashing regularly with seg faults. It took a little messing around to figure out that the Flash upgrade was to blame. Here are two relevant forum threads:
Embedded Flash played fine - in fact, noticeably better than with Flash 7 - however the seg fault would occur each time I navigated AWAY from a page with flash. So it is happening when the flash plugin is closing out. (Don’t worry, I submitted a bug.)
Rolling back to Flash 7 turned out to be a little hairy. Adobe hasn’t archived older Linux flash players and the “flashplayer-nonfree” Debian/Ubuntu package simply downloads the latest from Adobe.
My solution was to install the flashplayer-mozilla and libflash-mozplugin packages with apt, copy out the two files I needed (libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt) and then use apt again to uninstall. I put libflashplayer.so in my /plugins/ directory and flashplayer.xpt in my /components/ directory, started firefox, and everything worked.
These directories are usually found either in your firefox install path (in my case, /opt/firefox/) or in your mozilla profile (e.g. ~/.mozilla/). If you’ve installed firefox with apt, look in /usr/lib/firefox, /usr/lib/mozilla, or /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox for the plugins directory.
Like I said, a little hairy!
I found the Adobe Flash Player Version Test helpful with this process.
Notably, I did not have this issue on another machine that I installed clean two weeks ago with Ubuntu Dapper, Firefox 1.x, and Adobe Flash Player 9. Thus, the seg faults could be an issue peculiar to Breezy.
I plan to stick with Breezy, though, and hope that an updated Flash 9 is released soon. I am decidedly not a bleeding edge dude.
Tags
adobe, breezy, browser, bug, crash, fault, firefox, flash, linux, macromedia, plugin, segmentation, todomundo, ubuntu
February 25th, 2007 at 23:43:57 (PST -04:00)
You say you are not a bleeding-edge kind of guy which would make me understand keeping back from Feisty or Edgy, but not upgrading to Dapper I think is just keeping a little too far behind.
Thank you for documenting your steps here. I think if more people do that we will solve the age old issue that Linux has had with poor documentation.
February 26th, 2007 at 12:18:39 (PST -04:00)
Actually, I would have upgraded to Dapper already had I partitioned my HDD differently during the Breezy install. As is, I will have to do some significant data shuffling and repartioning.
All my other machines have separate / and /home partitions which has made my life 1000x better.
July 19th, 2007 at 02:26:19 (PDT -04:00)
I have the problem, that my firefox 2 with flash 9 on breezy crashes on some webpages. When I start firefox and call first a page with a flash 7 movie and leave it open it doesn’t happen any more. So I put on one of my web pages a flash movie (http://babelhost.net/143.0.html), which I call as first action when I start firefox. After this I go on working in different tabs and leave the flash movie in the first tab all the time running. No more segmentation faults. Maybe it works at other people to.