[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

I think there are numerous 64 bit Ubuntu users who are suffering from the crash of Flash Player just like myself.  There is a better way to install Flash Player for 64 bit Linux than installing one from the Ubuntu repository and that is what I am about to write.  This is obviously not the perfect solution yet I think the best way to use 64bit Flash Player for now.  I hope Adobe will release a stable 64 bit Flash Player for Linux soon.  Anyway, here we go!

Adobe has released a preview version of Flash Player (Flash Player “Square”) for 64bit Linux.
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_square.html
At the bottom of the web page, you can find the download link.

Download plug-in for 64-bit Linux (TAR.GZ, 4.1 MB)

In my case, the latest alpha version of 64 bit Flash player does not work well (e.g. Video on youtube constantly freezes) yet the previous alpha one works better. So first, try the latest one and if it doesn’t work well, download the following one.

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.d21.1.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

Before installing it, if there is a previously installed Flash player, it has to be removed first.

To check it, open ‘Synaptic Package Manager’.
System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager

Search by 'flash' and make sure neither flashplugin-nonfree nor flashplugin-installer is installed. If any of these are installed, remove first.

Extract the libflashplayer file downloaded to the firefox ‘plugins’ directory.
e.g.) If the file is in the /home/username/Desktop directory,

$ cd /usr/lib/firefox/plugins
$ sudo tar -zxvf ~/Desktop/flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz

To use this Flash player in other browsers such as Opera, create the symbolic link to the /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so file in the ‘/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins’ directory.

$ cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so

If the file with the same name already exists, user ‘f’ option to overwrite it.

$ sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Now, open the Firefox and test if it works well.

CPU: E2160 1.80 GHz
RAM: 4 GiB
Graphic Chip: Intel G33/31 (on board)

This is Ubuntu Linux 9.04 just released about two days ago (24th, April) as I already mentioned in my previous post.

I used a LiveCD of Ubuntu Linux 9.04 to check if it works well on my PC. It fortunately works well so I upgraded mine from 8.10 to 9.04.  The screencast above is made after the upgrade. It looks slow in the video yet that’s because of the software I used to record the desktop. It works really fast indeed without the software used to screencast.

These are screenshots taken before the upgrade.

Start Upgrading to 9.04

Upgrade In Progress

The size of the memory installed on my PC is 4 GiB but it does not have to be 4GiB or bigger.  I need 4 GiB for the software I use to develop web applications.  Those development tools and servers require lots of memory.  However, based on my experience, without using that kind of heavy applications, 2 GiB is enough or even 1 GiB is still fine although for 1 GiB memory I rather recommend Xubuntu which is a type of Ubuntu with Xfce as its desktop environment.  Xfce is lightweight and fast.

Anyway, Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope works fine so far although I found some trivial problems such as the one described here.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-app-install/+bug/354563/

Compiz also seems to be a bit unstable yet hasn’t crashed.  I’m sure the Ubuntu development team will make it stable soon.  It normally becomes fairly stable one month after it is released.  In the meantime, the users can report all the bugs they found through the issue tracking system for Ubuntu that is Launchpad.

So what I feel about the new release is that it seems to be more stable than the previous release (8.10). I’m quite satisfied so far.  The following information is a quick review of the new one.

* The problems in the previous version (8.10) yet fixed in the new version.
-X-Window (probably only GNOME?) freezes if Ctrl+Alt+F1~F6 keys are pressed to enter console mode => Fixed in 9.04

-Firefox freezes with Google toolbar when opening more than one Firefox window. => Fixed in 9.04 (I’m not sure if it was fixed before but I had it when I used 8.04).

-The window decorator of some KDE applications using QT library (e.g. Umbrello, Kompare) disappears and it is impossible to resize the windows of these applications. As far as I remember, it only happens in 64bit version meaning 32bit version doesn’t have it. => Fixed in 9.04

-Using comma to separate cells in Open Office 3.0 Spread Sheet causes some error. The bug described here.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/306602
=> Fixed in 9.04. Ubuntu 8.10 doesn’t have Open Office 3.0 but 2.4. When I installed 3.0 through the repository the information about which is taken from the link blow, it had that problem.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-To-Install-OpenOffice-org-3-0-in-Ubuntu-8-10-96449.shtml

Oh I forgot to say that Ubuntu 9.04 has Open Office 3.0 pre-installed by the way.

OK, these are what I found so far.

I’m using Compiz, GNOME Do, Cairo Dock and many other useful applications.  One good news is that Cairo Dock which is my favourite Dock application can now be found from the Ubuntu repository which means all I need to do in order to install it is to use ‘Add/Remove Application’ menu.   I had to add the Cairo Dock repository manually before if I want to install it or even worse scenario is downloading the deb package file and install it manually.

A new file system namely ext4 which is faster than ext3 is available in Ubuntu 9.04. However, for now it might not be a good idea to use it as there may be some problem like this.
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781?comments=all
It seems to be fixed though. Anyway, the comments in this bug report post are very interesting.   This might be evidence of how Linux is being evolved by the developers as well as the users of it I believe.

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Desktop

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) is now released. It’s time to upgrade!

The version number of Ubuntu indicates the year and month in which it is release. So ’9.04′ means it is released in April (04), 2009.  I’ve just downloaded it and will use the LiveCD first to see if it works well on my PC.  If so, I can use the ‘Update Manager’ to upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04. So handy!

Whenever I say I’m using Linux, I can hear from others that “you will regret using it if you need to update the kernel or a new version is released thus you want to install the new one because it is so difficult to do that”.  Well well, I’m sorry but your experience with Linux is outdated.  Nowadays, it is extremely easy to use Linux especially Ubuntu Linux and I can say with quite certainty that Ubuntu Linux Desktop Edition is easier to use than MS Windows.  Updating kernel or to a new version is as easy as clicking the update button on the Update Manager.  Regarding application installation, it can be done with the ‘Add / Remove Applications’ feature which provides a function to search all the available applications on the Ubuntu software repository.  If you can’t find what you are looking for, there is ‘Synaptic Package Manager’ which is a kind of an advanced software package manager, and it gives you more application list.  Anyway, a thousand hearings are not worth one seeing so better try it!