Saturday, May 29, 2010

Ubuntu and Flash Bothers

Ubuntu is normally a wonderful operating system distribution.

Sometimes a problem arises when it cannot decide if it is an OS or a philosophy.  For example, after one version upgrade I needed to reinstall the package unbutu-restricted-extras.  The version upgrade made the old version of that package obsolete, but did not include a new version because the package includes material that is not open source and is thus contrary to what is officially part of Ubuntu.

The last version upgrade broke two things named flash: viewing Macromedia Flash files on certain websites, and properly mounting and unmounting removable media sticks (which used to be called "flash drives").

The first problem was apparently caused when Adobe updated the Flash formatting on the same days that Ubuntu released its new version.  I tried two fixes that have been used in past years by other people: reinstalling the package did not work, but installing the package from Adobe's website rather than the current Ubuntu repository did solve the problem.

The second problem was caused by having too many packages installed.  Normally Ubuntu is very good at notifying the user when packages conflict, but this time a conflict causing problems but not declared.  Reinstalling pmount might have also been required.

No comments: