Flash problems with Chrome/Linux

December 18, 2011 12:53 PM

Problems with my netbook that I don't understand! Linux/Chrome/Flash...details inside.

Last spring, the SSD on my ASUS EEEpc fried. A friend of mine was gracious enough to fix it enough so that it now is running Linux (Puppeee distro) off of an SD card. This has been acceptable, but I'm now having some issues. I'm using Chrome as my browser, and it's completely incapable of using Flash...it just immediately crashes as soon as I go to watch a video or something. Is this a problem with Flash itself, with Chrome, with the SD card, or with Puppeee? It's also an issue with audio...nothing crashes, but it skips and skips.

posted by altopower to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I'm not sure that there's a high enough concentration of Puppy Linux experts here to be able to diagnose this remotely. Have you tried a Puppy Linux discussion board? If you go to "Beginners Help" or "Users" at this site you will find people that would know exactly what questions to ask and where to start diagnosing the issue.

There are many potential issues that could cause your skipping sound. I suspect the devs at the discussion forum I linked could help you track that one down too.

You're probably more likely facing a software bug or installation problem than a hardware one -- this doesn't sound like something that a bad SD card would cause.
posted by jdwhite at 4:55 PM on December 18, 2011

Unfortunately, Flash on Linux isn't great at the best of times, and a (relatively) low powered netbook won't help.

You might have more luck with one of many scripts that download the flv files, and then playing it in mplayer, rather than streaming. I have recently had success with this. However, Adobe / Content Providers keep moving the goalposts regarding how flash files are saved / cached locally so you might need to stay up-to-date with any changes.
posted by dirm at 8:19 PM on December 18, 2011

Response by poster: jdwhite, I'm checking out that forum now. My problem, though, is that I don't feel I have the requisite basic understanding of Linux needed to really function on a forum like that. There's nothing I hate more than showing my idiocy. :)

dirm, I may try that script and see what happens. If you don't mind, could you explain what mplayer is, though?
posted by altopower at 4:28 PM on December 19, 2011

mplayer's one of the commonly used video players on Linux. It's almost certainly installed in Puppy Linux.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:49 PM on December 19, 2011