Update:
I was asked “Why not apt?” As it turns out, the repositories still have Flash 7 listed in them. Nevertheless, this article may be a better/different way to install Flash 9, especially as it looks like it would include automatic updating, and it uses a more standard way of updating (which generally should be via apt; the tricky issue as always is when one wants something not in the repositories).

So earlier this month I installed Flash 9 for Linux on my Firefox from a HowtoForge article. Flash is one of those necessary evils*, I suppose, but it gets more difficult to ignore entirely so while I refuse to use it myself, I do install it so I can see what the heck is going on in some of the sites I visit. Not to mention that YouTube and VideoEgg both use Flash (the latter version 9 in particular).

To install it, I went to the Adobe download site. It automatically detects the incoming OS, so this step needs to be done from the Linux OS. This brings up a tar.gz file which I downloaded and saved. Using a terminal window, I unpacked it via

tar xvfz install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

That gave me a new directory, which I cd’d to. I ran the installer:

sudo ./flashplayer-installer

After getting the root password, there’s some information and verbiage, until eventually it asks:

Please enter the installation path of the Mozilla, SeaMonkey, or Firefox browser...

At this point, I entered /usr/lib/firefox — more on that in a moment. After doing this, it chugged along for a few more seconds before informing me it was done. So now I fired up a Firefox window and all looked well. This was back in the first week of February.

Then about a week ago, I started noticing little oddities. Some of the places I was visiting started using something called VideoEgg, which simply would not run — it just spun in place forever as if it was downloading. I got very hit and miss behaviors, so I checked my plugins on Firefox via about:plugins. Lo and behold, it said I had version 7! Scratching my head, I went through the same process as above, checked again, and it showed 9. This kind of thing made me grumpy, especially when I spotted the same problem next time I started up Firefox. This time I kept searching on “Shockwave” in the about:plugins page and voila! I found I had both versions installed; and the behavior depended on which came up first.

I knew, from that plugin page, the relevant file name is libflashplayer.so. So I used a terminal window and looked for it using

locate libflashplayer.so

and what I found was a copy in /usr/lib/firefox/plugins as well as in ~/.mozilla/plugins. So I renamed the one in .mozilla (as having the older date) to another name, shut Firefox down, and started it up again. This time only one version of Flash (yay!) and at version 9 (yay!). It turns out that Firefox pretty much looks at four places: the global Mozilla and Firefox directories, and the local (home account) Mozilla and Firefox directories. It will find plugins in all of them (and probably a few more for all I know) so using any of these directories in the initial flashplayer-installer script will “work” but if it isn’t the same directory that the previous flash installation resides in, that double plugin situation will occur.

So, what I would recommend before installing Flash 9 is to first see where any older flash plugins are residing (via the locate command above) and either use that as the directory to give to the original flashplayer-installer script, or clean up afterwards, as I did.

And have I got a test site for Flash..

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*Look at the date on that Flash article!. There are numerous other reasons to hate it as well, but the mockery it makes of accessibility issues, particularly for the visually impaired, is the number one for me.

Webcams are interesting beasties…

First of all, I found out, somewhat to my surprise, that the quality of a webcam can depend as much on the software used as on the camera itself. It turns out that Yahoo’s webcam is very choppy and slow, though it gets the job done. The webcam through the MSN protocol was much better. However, using Kopete’s MSN protocol let me to run into a bug where the incoming cam just freezes and lags — at one point, I realized I was seeing images 10 minutes old. I can only speculate the packets took a quick side trip to a sun-drenched beach somewhere first before coming back to our gray, drizzly area.

So, I tried out aMSN to see if it was true that the webcam performance was better over MSN. This package is strictly for the MSN protocol and is designed just for Linux. The interface to this looks a little rough around the edges, although it’s possible that it’s a font issue in my installation. Ubuntu has 0.95-2.1 in its repositories, but I don’t recommend installing that. aMSN has a later version (0.96) that’s demonstrably improved, and I found it here using a standalone installer (a tar.gz for more traditional compile/install is also offered) which intrigued me enough to try it out, and it installed without any problems.

And indeed, it proved quite responsive with both incoming / outgoing webcams, showing the picture with much less choppiness.

I think in conclusion I’d have to say that I really look forward to Gaim incorporating video capability (which is rumored for 3.0, but as I said, I’m not holding my breath since 2.0 just came out) because I like Gaim’s interface the best. Kopete seems to be actively working on its code, judging from all the email on its devel list, so I would expect the bug I found to be fixed quickly. At that point, I’d be happy to use Kopete, as I can see its interface growing on me. It’s just a pity it doesn’t have a windows version, as I like being able to use the same programs at home and at work. But, in the meantime, aMSN’s not bad at all and I won’t mind using it for the webcam until one of the multiprotocol apps work for me. I prefer to run as few programs as possible

But if what you need is a robust MSN connection, I’d definitely recommend aMSN.

Those busy folks are at it again…just installed another update. This one apparently comes highly recommended with security fixes and the like. As usual, I used Mark on WordPress’s zipped diff file. No fuss, no muss…

What a trip…I decided to see if I could get a webcam running properly under Ubuntu. The answer was eventually yes, but it was a little bit of work.

First of all I did a little homework and found that Logitech webcams were the most likely to be recognized by Linux. The company, bless ‘em, works with the linux community to provide the rest of us with the correct drivers. There’s a very nice list of supported webcams here, it’s worth checking this out first. Some webcams will work “out of the box”, but most will probably need to have either spca5xx (linux kernel versions prior to 2.6.11) or gspcav1 (versions after, which includes Ubuntu’s Edgy Eft).

Now, as far as IM’s go, there are pretty much two choices: amsn (for MSN, which I didn’t even bother with, because I don’t even have an msn account) and kopete which supports both MSN and Yahoo (among others), with webcam support on MSN/Yahoo protocols. I have a Yahoo account (as does my friend with whom I tested) so that’s what I used.

I ordered the Logitech (QuickCam Chat) and in the meantime tested out receiving the images from my friend (who ran hers on the regular Yahoo application from her Windows XP setup). The initial trial run was disappointing as all I ever got from her webcam was the first still in the stream and nothing further. Upon some investigation, which included the helpful folks at the kopete-devel mailing list, who informed me that my version, 0.12.3, needed to be updated to 0.12.4.

At this point, I got a little bit confused, because I could find no deb (or other) package for kopete 0.12.4, and when I said that, the response was “There is no separate tarball.” After puzzling over that for a while, I realized what they meant was that it was all rolled in with KDE itself. That is to say, if I upgraded from KDE 3.5.5 (which is what’s in the Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 distribution) to KDE 3.5.6, kopete 0.12.4 would come bundled with that. Oy. After noodling around that one for a while, I found these partial instructions for Kubuntu (other dists can look here). Once I incorporated the Riddell key, used the synaptic package manager to add one of the listed repositories (not forgetting to reload) and then, the important part, running the following command on the terminal:

sudo apt-get upgrade kubuntu-desktop

With that, I now had KDE 3.5.6 and by extension the upgraded kopete on my system. Woot! And when I fired up the connection with my friend, after a little fiddling on both our parts, her stream came through loud and clear. Double woot!!

So now the second part, getting it to recognize MY webcam (which had arrived yesterday ). This went more quickly but was a bit wonkier. First of all, I had to install and use the gspcav1 wrapper. I followed both these sets of instructions more or less (I skipped some of the setup because my system is already set up to compile things): here and here. I have no idea why there are instructions for installing spca5xx on Edgy as the linux kernel on Edgy (check with uname -r on the command line) precludes the use of spca5xx. Use the first set of instructions if you’re installing the older spca5xx stuff for linux kernels prior to 2.6.11; the second set if you’re installing gspcav1. But note that either way you’ll modprob something called spca5xx so don’t let that surprise you.

And this time, my webcam was up and running and ran just fine on kopete to my friend’s screen. So it was all quite good. The only issue left is whether or not the webcam can be set somehow to be less choppy. It’s really got a horrendous refresh rate, and it must be possible to clear that up a bit? If any of you have suggestions, please feel free to let me know.

Hope this helped someone out. My understanding is that webcameras and the like remain a weak spot in Linux, and it’s certainly true nothing worked out of the box (I do understand some webcams do not need the spca5xx/gspcav1 wrapper, and do work when plugged in, so it might be worth finding those; I was a cheapskate and got the cheapest camera that seemed to work alright.) However, it wasn’t too bad getting it to work; the worst part was finding all the information.

I also made use of a nice quick little tool just to verify that the webcam worked (for some reason my friend isn’t at her computer 24/7 with HER webcam for testing purposes…) called camorama which I found available in the synaptic package manager as well. It was a handy utility to verify that the webcam was indeed working.

Funny how ubiquitous IM is, isn’t it? I even regularly IM my co workers who are right down the hallway from me. It’s easier to ping questions and check what the latest status of things are, without actually having to get up and gasp walk down several meters to his office. Then again, I casually chat with people around the world at all sorts of odd times.

My favorite program is Gaim. I like it for a number of reasons, but two primary ones are that it’s cross platform, so I can run it on my windows (at work) and linux (everything else) installations, and not have to familiarize myself with two different programs. (There’s not a version for mac, unfortunately, but I understand Adium is a derivation.) The second reason is that it is multi protocol, meaning that I can stash my AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, and other Jabber ID’s all in one spot, again instead of running a separate IM application for each account I’ve got.

About my only complaint, and the impetus for this post, is that Gaim does not yet support video (eg with a webcam). The developers say that it’s planned for 3.0, but inasmuch as we are just reaching 2.0 and there’s no timeline in place, I have no idea when this will come out. There was a gaim-vv fork at one point, but that seems to have disappeared, folded back into the main project for the later release.

Now it appears that using a webcam on Linux is slightly tricky, but to start with, one must at least have an IM application of some sort that supports it. Which led me to Kopete. Now, I’m willfully ignoring the little voice in my head that persists in saying “kaopectate” as I download this little puppy and check him out. [Interestingly, this project also shares configuration stuff with Adium, might check that out a bit.]

If you’re running ubuntu, kopete is readily available in the repositories and is advertised to understand video. I’ve been playing with it, and it’s a nice little piece of eye candy so far. I like the interface and the colours and such. The cutest part may be the excited cheerleader swirl you get in the system tray if you’ve got it all shut down off the desktop and you get an incoming message. It seems to be pretty robust all around, and although I like Gaim’s interface better (it’s much more compact in the chat panel), it seems pretty extensively customizable, so there’s probably a configuration I can find that I like.

(The webcam is currently in the mail somewhere between Amazon.com and me, so that part of the post is later.)

Kopete webcam Howto.