Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

November 13, 2006

Getting flash working in Firefox in Linux

Filed under: Computer Software,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:32 PM

The past few hours I have been trying to get Flash to work on my Linux system using Firefox. Specifically I wanted to be able to listen to music at Pandora.com. I tried everything I could think of including installing different versions of the Flash plugin. I even installed gnash , which is a free version of the flash player but nothing seemed to work.

The funny part was when I tried accessing the swf file directly it would open it and I would see the player initializing but since it needed info from other sections of the page it wouldn’t play anything. Finally I thought that maybe one of my extension’s was causing problems so I tried shutting off Adblock and that fixed the issue.

So now I could start the Pandora music player, but I still didn’t get any sound. The fix for that issue was thankfully simple, all I had to do was:

  • Install alsa-oss by issuing the following command as root: apt-get install alsa-oss
  • Edit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and add the following line to it:
    FIREFOX_DSP=”aoss”
  • Restart Firefox

After I did this I can now enjoy music from Pandora without any issues. Well, almost any issues. For some reason when I play music from Pandora Firefox memory usage goes upto 70%. I am running Firefox 2.0 on a Debian Unstable system. If any of you have suggestions on how to reduce the CPU usage please let me know.

Well this is all for now. Hope this helps someone else also.

– Suramya

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