On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 10:04:29AM -0700, Sebastian Marketsmueller wrote: > Hi, > > I am a flash player dev at adobe and hoping to make the ubuntu + flash > installation experience better (after that slashdot article with the ubuntu > girlfriend :)). What I am seeing right now is that ubuntu provides a flash > nonfree install through the package management system which works quite > well: if I try to open a swf on a webpage the installation is painless and > straightforward. Unfortunately sites like youtube direct people to adobe.com > for getting their flash player from there through javascript instead of > letting the browser figure out a plugin installation process. On our > download page we do not have a .deb package yet, so confusion ensues. Now we > could just add our own .deb package for download there, but I believe that > the right thing would be to point people to the ubuntu managed deb so they > get a consistent install that also gets updated. So my questions are: > - any good ideas on how we can best achieve that? (we could always just put > up a link on our download page: click here for ubuntu) > - is there some way we can help you with your own deb, stuff that makes > things easier for you? >
Thanks for approaching us on this. Mainly we have a three main problems in ubuntu with the flash experience: 1. we are not allowed to distribute the binaries directly. Thus we made an installer-package which breaks in times when adobe releases a new version (because of md5sum mismatches); I don't expect that you can do anything about this as this has to be resolved on a legal/business side. 2. lots of sites use the flash detection kit, which doesn't pop up the "install missing plugins ..." feature of firefox. Your suggestion to add a direct link for ubuntu users to the adobe flash site sounds like a good approach to deal with this issue on your side. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread you can provide a link apt:flashplugin-nonfree on your site which will trigger the install of that package if the user has admin permissions. 3. unrelated to this, but even more devastating to user experience is the fact that adobe flash cannot use pulseaudio server by default - which is the default on our desktop. Not using pulseaudio will make sound break for a lot of users. We have a workaround for that by installing libflashsupport.so, which is a library that hooks into flash by providing some undocumented symbols and redirecting sound output to the pulse audio server. Unfortunately, this makes firefox _crash_ and since we have no information about the contract it implements we would need an adobe internal developer to take a look. I would appreciate if you could take a look or forward this to the appropriate developer(s). Please let me know. I can forward the details to you. Thanks, - Alexander -- Ubuntu-motu mailing list Ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-motu
