Flash on ubuntu 14

Getting flash running on ubuntu is a circus.

This was for my daughter's HP Pavilion 10.

(I had previously been running openbsd on it for myself. Never had time to grab the source for the wifi and get it running. Wifi works on Ubuntu. I don't know when I'll get a computer for me, next. Maybe one of the opensource/openhardware arm notebooks like the novena, if I can talk myself into the somewhat steep price for near-freedom.)

Getting Adobe's Flash working on it was fairly straightforward, seemed to be handled okay by the software center without a lot of help.

But that's really old, and it's slow, too. But it does run in Firefox.

Chromium doesn't recognize it. (Which was no surprise to me, of course.)

So we tried a number of things. Installing the package from the software center doesn't really do much.

Then I found the ubuntu wiki at wiki.ubuntu.com:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Chromium/Getting-Partner-Flash

It looked useful, but Software Center said it was installed. We did add the repository for it in the Software Center.

So I climbed the url to

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Chromium/

and found several more pages. This one looked really useful:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Chromium/Getting-Flash/TroubleInstalling

But when I tried

/usr/sbin/update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --status

I got this error:

ERROR: failed to retrieve status information from google : W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:
1397BC53640DB551

I found this page on stackexchange:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/279825/pepperflashplugin-nonfree-error-failed-to-retrieve-status-information-from-go

So I pulled that key in to the admin user's keystore:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 1397BC53640DB551

and exported it to pepperflashplugin's keystore:

gpg --export --armor 1397BC53640DB551 | sudo sh -c 'cat >> /usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree/pubkey-google.txt'

and then I uninstalled pepperflashplugin-nonfree.

(I know that Google was required to do that nonfree thing by Adobe. But then again, Google had the resources even back then to make gnash work, if they had been willing to thumb their noses in Adobe's face. Billion dollar cap companies are not free to thumb their noses in another company's face. Money is a huge ball and chain.)

[JMR201605030730: the command to export the key, split into multiple lines in case Microsoft or other ads get pasted over the end:

gpg --export --armor 1397BC53640DB551 | sudo sh -c \
'cat >> \
/usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree/pubkey-google.txt'

Hah. Yes, Microsoft is paying Google to target opensource blogposts for them. Of course they are. Why would you think they would not? You do understand we are in the midst of the worst war this world has ever seen, or will ever see again, don't you? Where do you keep your freedom?

Ahem. Sorry. I'm not supposed to say that. Carry on.
]

Uninstalled Adobe's Flashplugin, just for good measure.

Installed pepperflashplugin-nonfree from Software-Center again. No recognition of the plugin in Chromium. Actually, the message was different. It said flash was not installed, instead of saying nothing when I plugged

about:flash

into the Chromium browser's URL field. Tried

/usr/sbin/update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --status

again, and this time it said not installed instead of telling me the key wasn't there. So I tried

/usr/sbin/update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --help

and it told me that --help was not a valid command, but it gave me a list of commands anyway. So I tried

/usr/sbin/update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --uninstall

followed by

/usr/sbin/update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --install

and I got this long output from downloading google-chrome-stable. From what I hear, there may be some extraction of the plugin or something involved. I haven't checked to see whether Chrome itself is now installed. But

about:flash

in Chromium now tells me it's installed, and

/usr/sbin/update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --status

also tells me warm fuzzies. Maybe we're in good shape.

Firefox won't do flash with just pepperflash, and someone says you can't have both installed with good results. It looks like Chromium's running my daughter's game. Yep. We're in business.

(That's not really the order things happened in, but it's as close as I want to try to tell. I keep falling asleep. It's time to get the family to bed.)

Oh. One last thing. It looks like I'll have to show her how to use the update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree tool to regularly update pepperflash and hopefully avoid being pwned. Maybe. I have to show her how to use the software center to update the whole thing, as well, maybe I'll find that pepperflash's update tool provides the proper interface for software center to do it automajickly.

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