For me the most annoying problem in 64bit Breezy is the lack of a 64bit
flash plugin (a small gripe, true, but without
flash there is no
Homestar Runner!). However, after a bit of mucking around, and some help from other forumgoers (particularly Tux61), even this small gripe is now forever banished.
To get a working 32bit firefox, you can follow these steps:
1) Download a 32bit binary version of firefox from mozilla.org. I used the 1.5RC2 build
here. You should be able to use any i386/i686 build, but I haven't tested anything else.
2) Unpack the .tar.gz file to your favourite program-installation-directory. I use a Programs directory under my home directory. Installing firefox here means I have write privileges, so the automatic update works. For people who have multiple users on their system, somewhere like /usr/local or /opt is probably a better choice.
3) Get the ia32 libs, and linux32 so we can fool firefox into downloading 32bit plugins.
Code:
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk linux32
4) Create a /etc/pango32/pangorc file:
Code:
sudo gedit /etc/pango32/pangorc
and fill it with this:
Code:
[Pango]
ModuleFiles=/etc/pango32/pango.modules
[PangoX]
AliasFiles=/etc/pango/pangox.aliases
5) Create a firefox32 shell script
Code:
sudo gedit /usr/local/bin/firefox32
and fill it with this:
Code:
#!/bin/sh
export GTK_PATH=/usr/lib32/gtk-2.0
export PANGO_RC_FILE=/etc/pango32/pangorc
linux32 /path/to/firefox/firefox $@
And finally, make it executable:
Code:
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/firefox32
6) Watch your friends be amazed!
You can now edit your firefox launcher(s) to launch firefox32, rather than firefox. This will use your old firefox profile, and it seems that the Ubuntu packaged firefox & the new 1.5RC2 don't tread on each other's config too badly. The exception being that I got a thick grey bar at the bottom of the Ubuntu firefox window after running the RC2.
To get
flash working, just browse to a site using
flash (once again, I suggest
Homestar Runner ) - you can now just install the plugin normally though firefox!
Problems:
When I first installed
flash, it sort of worked, and sound played, but where the visuals should have been was blank. It turns out that this was due to my previous efforts to install
flash. Renaming the ~/.mozilla directory to something else, installing
flash, and then copying my bookmarks etc into the new .mozilla directory fixed it. You should be able to get away with just deleting the .mozilla/plugins directory, and possibly the ./mozilla/pluginreg.dat, but I didn't try that.
Flash sometimes doesn't have sound. I think that this is due to something else locking the soundcard, but I haven't followed it up at all. I suspect that following some of the instructions littering this board about
flash and sound should fix it
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