Caught between PulseAudio and a quiet place
At work (where I’m running a fresh install of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, because over time the distribution upgrades botched xorg and my display drivers beyond my ability to repair them) Flash video plays in Firefox 3.0b5 without audio. This is not exactly a bad thing, but it’s not much fun. What’s the point of working in front of a computer all day if you can’t occasionally pass around the odd Flash video? Like this.
Apparently this is because PulseAudio, the new sound server in Ubuntu, does not play well with flashplugin-nonfree (aka Flash 9.0 r124). I see a lot of places online telling me to just sudo apt-get remove libflashsupport and everything will be peachy-keen. But I don’t have libflashsupport installed!
Today was the first time I found someone telling me I should actually install libflashsupport to get Flash audio support into PulseAudio. And guess what? I could finally hear audio from Flash. But it made Firefox completely unstable, closing unexpectedly upon encountering the odd Flash embed, e.g.
http://www.ironicsans.com/60_seconds/
Even stranger, at home, on a vastly underpowered laptop, running Hardy Heron, Flash audio actually works (I don’t know why, I don’t have libflashsupport installed), which is useful for projects like White Noise Lounge, but as a consequence, Firefox crashes. Often. Way more often than Firefox 2 ever did. And I’m not sure it’s Firefox’s fault. Obviously having a stable Firefox at work is more important than Flash audio, but you know what I’d really like? BOTH!
If there’s a Barack Obama of the open source world these days, it’s got to be Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical, the driving force behind Ubuntu. I mean today you can buy a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled! You can apt-get install sun-java. So Mark, can you please get Firefox and Flash and PulseAudio to play nice on Ubuntu? Pretty please.
Sheesh, that “odd Flash video” gave me sweaty palms, and caused me to lean toward the wall. I could not ever ever do that sort of stuff. The Grand Canyon was bad enough, and this one was way way overboard for me with my healthy fear of heights and especially with my balance disability.