upgraded my laptop to the 64 bit Ubuntu Karmic Koala beta yesterday. For me, Flash was very broken…
The 32 bit Plugin
Ubuntu defaults to installing the 32 bit Adobe Flash plugin and runs it under nspluginwrapper. When I run the plugin this way it will not accept mouse clicks properly. This seems to be a known issue. The bug reports make it sound like disabling compiz fixes this… I don’t run compiz, I run the Sawfish window manager. I tested Metacity and it works just fine.
The 64 bit Plugin
Next I tried disabling the 32 bit plugin so that it would use the 64 bit plugin that I already had installed in my .mozilla directory. Mouse clicks worked… Unfortunately it was crashing constantly. I couldn’t even load gmail without crashing Firefox.
Is it Firefox’s Fault?
I have both Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 installed. Both were just as crash happy. I was hoping it would be as simple as blaming Firefox 3.5…
Firefox in a Jaunty chroot
I had a 64 bit jaunty chroot environment already sitting on my hard drive. It only took a few commands and a little waiting before I had Firefox and the 64 bit Flash plugin from Adobe installed in the chroot. It ran perfectly.
I compared the output of ldd libflashplayer.so from inside and outside the chroot. One extra library was showing up in the chroot, libresolv.so.2.
How to Fix It
Just install the libadns1 package:
sudo apt-get install libadns1
That fixed it for me. As always, your mileage may vary!