In my quest for Flash that could handle Hulu videos, I started distro hopping and settled on Crunchbang 9.04. I've used Crunchbang before; it is basically a slimmed-down customization of Ubuntu, with all the bloat removed. Gnome and all of its various supporting applications such as Nautilus and Evolution have been stripped out and replaced with Openbox, a lightweight window manager and such applications as PCManFM, the lightening-fast file manager, Claws mail, Terminator, the terminal emulator, and a lot of the usual suspects like Firefox, Rhythmbox, VLC, AbiWord and Gnumeric, and Pidgin. It even comes with a few things that Ubuntu doesn't come with by default, such as Skype, MP3 and DVD playback capabilities, and our friend, the Adobe Flash plugin.
Crunchbang, like Ubuntu, automatically installed the drivers for my wireless card and I was back on the internet within minutes of completing the installation. I can't tell you what a relief it was to have wireless back after a few days of sitting in the corner of Mrs. Jizldrangs' office, tethered to the router with a LAN cable!
To make a long story short, I never did get Flash to where I could use Hulu. I tried a bunch of stuff after getting Crunchbang set up, such as installing libgl-mesa-dev, and after that didn't work I installed Hulu Desktop and that was pretty terrible.
The closest thing I had to success was when I went directly to Adobe's website and downloaded their Flash plugin for Linux. The version up there at the time of this posting is 10.0.32.18, and it didn't exactly give me smooth Hulu shows but the shows were the smoothest yet. You can get it by going to the Adobe's Flash Player Download Center, dropping down the menu at the bottom and selecting ".deb for Ubuntu 8.04+", then hitting "Agree and Install Now". That will download the package to your desktop. When it is finished you will have to install it using:
$ sudo dpkg -i /path-to-deb-package/install_flash_player_10_linux.deb
When I did that I received an error that there were 2 dependencies, libnspr4-dev and libnss3-dev that were not installed, so I did:
$ sudo apt-get install libnspr4-dev libnss3-dev
It took about 15 seconds to install those libraries, after which I reran the dpkg command above and I was in business (or, at least, as "in business" as I was going to get, considering that Hulu still wasn't watchable). If you do this, watch out for the update manager as it will try to "update" your flash player to the worse one in the repos.
So I spent several days distro hopping to get this working and came up empty-handed. I really don't understand why this is so difficult; I realize that this is an older laptop but it has been playing full-screen DVDs since Mrs. Jizldrangs bought it for grad school way back in 2003. It has a lot more memory now than it did back then, so it seems like it should definitely be able to handle these lower-quality videos on the web. On the other hand, my desktop, which is a quad-core machine with more RAM and a much newer graphics card, handles Flash just fine, so I guess that either my laptop doesn't have the resources or the hardware is not adequately supported under Linux (it has an ATI Radeon Mobility 7500, and I've seen several forum posts saying that ATI, now AMD, is dropping support for it after a certain version of Xorg; that angle may be worth chasing down).
Hopefully some of my future posts will be about how I was actually sucessfull in getting stuff to work...
Showing posts with label flash. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flash. Show all posts
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Hulu quest, Part 2: OpenSUSE
Ubuntu 9.04 was working just fine on my laptop. It did everything I needed it to do, and we lived happily until one fateful day when I tried to watch a show on Hulu. My Flash plugin couldn't handle the content, so I decided to do some distro hopping to see if I could get it working.
My first stop was OpenSUSE 11.1. I lost some time trying to use the network installer, which I chose because it was a smaller download, and after messing with it a bunch I was able to get it to start the install, but it got stuck on Step 2 of 6. It was probably doing stuff in the background, but I didn't feel like waiting all night for it to give me more feedback, so I abandoned the network installer and installed OpenSUSE using the KDE Live CD.
OpenSUSE showed a lot of promise for the first ten seconds or so, because that's how long I used it before I realized that my wireless card wasn't working. I have a Netgear PCMCIA wireless G card that I've had forever and have been able to get it working on multiple machines using Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and Slackware. It works right out of the box on Ubuntu, and for the other distros I've used ndiswrapper along with wpa_supplicant so that it will connect to my WPA wireless network with no problems. I've built up a decent bag of tricks for getting this card working over the years, so I was pretty confident that this would turn out to be a minor annoyance and I would be able to move on before long.
I installed the card drivers using ndiswrapper and went into knetworkmanager to connect it to the wireless. I could see the wireless network, and when trying to connect to it it looked like the WPA key was accepted but it hung and eventually failed trying to get an IP address. I got the same results using YaST2. I also tried using ifup from the command line but the laptop refused to pick up an IP address. I tried giving it a static IP address and that appeared to work but I couldn't browse the web from Firefox. This was clearly going to take some elbow grease, if I was going to get it working at all.
I pulled out all the stops and tried pretty much every set of instructions I could find, including totally removing knetworkmanager and installing Wicd. I've used Wicd before and it is a fantastic network manager but it couldn't detect the wireless card, which is odd because knetworkmanager detected it just fine under ndiswrapper.
At some point I decided to return to the initial goal of installing OpenSUSE, which was getting Hulu to work. I got the Adobe Flash plugin installed and browsed to Hulu, but it was worse than anything I saw on Ubuntu. My Hulu show looked more like a slideshow than a motion picture. I'm sure there are settings that can be tweeked to speed it up, but I was fed up. Just a few hours short of 2 days after installing OpenSUSE I wiped it and moved on to the next leg of my quest: Crunchbang.
My first stop was OpenSUSE 11.1. I lost some time trying to use the network installer, which I chose because it was a smaller download, and after messing with it a bunch I was able to get it to start the install, but it got stuck on Step 2 of 6. It was probably doing stuff in the background, but I didn't feel like waiting all night for it to give me more feedback, so I abandoned the network installer and installed OpenSUSE using the KDE Live CD.
OpenSUSE showed a lot of promise for the first ten seconds or so, because that's how long I used it before I realized that my wireless card wasn't working. I have a Netgear PCMCIA wireless G card that I've had forever and have been able to get it working on multiple machines using Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and Slackware. It works right out of the box on Ubuntu, and for the other distros I've used ndiswrapper along with wpa_supplicant so that it will connect to my WPA wireless network with no problems. I've built up a decent bag of tricks for getting this card working over the years, so I was pretty confident that this would turn out to be a minor annoyance and I would be able to move on before long.
I installed the card drivers using ndiswrapper and went into knetworkmanager to connect it to the wireless. I could see the wireless network, and when trying to connect to it it looked like the WPA key was accepted but it hung and eventually failed trying to get an IP address. I got the same results using YaST2. I also tried using ifup from the command line but the laptop refused to pick up an IP address. I tried giving it a static IP address and that appeared to work but I couldn't browse the web from Firefox. This was clearly going to take some elbow grease, if I was going to get it working at all.
I pulled out all the stops and tried pretty much every set of instructions I could find, including totally removing knetworkmanager and installing Wicd. I've used Wicd before and it is a fantastic network manager but it couldn't detect the wireless card, which is odd because knetworkmanager detected it just fine under ndiswrapper.
At some point I decided to return to the initial goal of installing OpenSUSE, which was getting Hulu to work. I got the Adobe Flash plugin installed and browsed to Hulu, but it was worse than anything I saw on Ubuntu. My Hulu show looked more like a slideshow than a motion picture. I'm sure there are settings that can be tweeked to speed it up, but I was fed up. Just a few hours short of 2 days after installing OpenSUSE I wiped it and moved on to the next leg of my quest: Crunchbang.
Hulu quest, Part 1: Ubuntu gets the axe
I have an old Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop that has a Pentium 4 processor, and came with 256 megs of RAM, which I upgraded to 1 gig, the max for this unit. I'm not trying to game on it or anything (that's what my desktop PC is there for); I generally just use it for the less resource intensive computing tasks.
I was running the "flashplugin-nonfree" plugin, which is the official Flash plugin from Adobe, and to its credit it generally worked pretty well. Grooveshark and Homestar worked just fine, and YouTube worked OK as long as the video wasn't too long, so up until this point I didn't have any complaints. But suddenly my wife and I started watching a few shows a week on Hulu and my Flash plugin fell flat on its face.
It fell hard, too. The show would play for about 1 minute, then the picture would freeze for a few seconds, then pick up for a few seconds and freeze again, with the audio cutting in and out accordingly. Needless to say this does not make for a relaxing evening, so I started a quest to get Hulu working on my laptop.
I Googled all over the place and tried a bunch of stuff to get it working. I created the config file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and added "OverrideGPUValidation=true" to it and that didn't work. I tried Gnash and Swfdec and both were worse than the Adobe plugin. I tried installing libflashsupport but that didn't help (I found out later that this library was created for earlier versions of Flash and Flash 10 no longer needs it). I even tried using Hulu in Seamonkey to see if the problem was in Firefox, but no dice. I read in several locations that recent versions of Ubuntu had messed with some of the PulseAudio settings and this was the cause of the problem, so I decided to do a little distro hopping to see if the grass really was greener on the other side.
More on that later...
I was running the "flashplugin-nonfree" plugin, which is the official Flash plugin from Adobe, and to its credit it generally worked pretty well. Grooveshark and Homestar worked just fine, and YouTube worked OK as long as the video wasn't too long, so up until this point I didn't have any complaints. But suddenly my wife and I started watching a few shows a week on Hulu and my Flash plugin fell flat on its face.
It fell hard, too. The show would play for about 1 minute, then the picture would freeze for a few seconds, then pick up for a few seconds and freeze again, with the audio cutting in and out accordingly. Needless to say this does not make for a relaxing evening, so I started a quest to get Hulu working on my laptop.
I Googled all over the place and tried a bunch of stuff to get it working. I created the config file /etc/adobe/mms.cfg and added "OverrideGPUValidation=true" to it and that didn't work. I tried Gnash and Swfdec and both were worse than the Adobe plugin. I tried installing libflashsupport but that didn't help (I found out later that this library was created for earlier versions of Flash and Flash 10 no longer needs it). I even tried using Hulu in Seamonkey to see if the problem was in Firefox, but no dice. I read in several locations that recent versions of Ubuntu had messed with some of the PulseAudio settings and this was the cause of the problem, so I decided to do a little distro hopping to see if the grass really was greener on the other side.
More on that later...
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