Firefox on Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Adobe Flash Player issues

After installing Firefox 3.6 on my Kubuntu using repositories here

I removed firefox 3.5 before running the following command so you might want to use "upgrade" instead of "install" in the last command

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox

I realized that it can no longer play flash contents! I did a little bit search and found this solution :

sudo apt-get remove swfdec-mozilla
sudo apt-get remove mozilla-plugin-gnash
sudo apt-get remove adobe-flashplugin
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Unfortunately it didn't fix my problem so i decided to run firefox from terminal in order to see what's really wrong.

firefox --no-remote

Clearly something was wrong with flash libraries :

LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /home/user/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so [/home/user/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64]

So searched the error on google and after reading several articles with no luck an idea came into my mind. [ELFCLASS64] looks like an incompatibility between 32/64 versions! i checked Firefox to make sure that i've installed the correct version Help -> About (The Textarea at the bottom of the windows) :

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100218 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.6

As you can see it's 32bit so the only thing which remains is Adobe flash libraries. So i removed the Flash libraries i installed using Ubuntu repositories and used the one from Adobe site Adobe Flash Player (Download the .tar.gz for Linux) :

extract it (it includes a single file libflashplayer.so) and then copy it to Firefox's plugin folder :

cp /home/salek/Download/libflashplayer.so .
sudo cp /home/salek/Download/libflashplayer.so libflashplayer.so

If it didn't work for you i have something better , try the folowing command :

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

So what really caused this issue! well no accurate answer but probably outdated repository packages.

Updated (2010-05-02) : If your flash player does not have any sound! there is an easy solution, open command line and enter

alsamixer

You should be able to see a volume control channel list, for no apparent reason some are muted! use the arrow keys, or your mouse's wheel, to alter them.

Resources

• HowTo: Fix 4 common Kubuntu problems! • KDE Community Forums