Intrepid Upgrade

Ubuntu, why are you so hard on me? After putting of the upgrade for some time I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex". With hopes of 64 bit java and flash support, the option of package Open Office 3.0, I was nearly giddy about the options.

But, as of yet I am not convinced. My main frustrations: sound and flash support. Okay, you could theoretically say they are both conveniences. But honestly, if you cannot watch a HULU video without crashing Firefox 64 bit or have no sound from Firefox 32 bit, this is obviously not an upgrade.

So, I slowly amassing a list of fixes, how-to sites, and bug pages. And still can't keep things a float. I'm hesitantly even toying with the idea of a fresh install. What is this, Windows?

So here are the things that don't seem to work:



• Firefox 64bit Flash streaming video (at least not without crashing). Update: Rather than every time, it is now only intermittently, which I guess is an improvement. Unfortunately, firefox is also intermittently crashing on any site that has flash embedded (even though I'm using NoScript and Flashblock extensions).
  

  Flash streaming doesn't seem to work with the flashplugin-nonfree in the repositories. Nor does downloading the alpha release 10 from Adobe Labs. And creating a symlink in ~/.mozilla/plugins Next I'm going to try the install script from Hildoer and hope for the best.
  



• Firefox 32bit sound (My first try at a workaround).Update: No dice. My same sound issue, or rather lack thereof.


• Update: As far as streaming flash video goes, my only saving grace seems to be Opera. So, alas this is what I have come to, I have to completely change browsers just to open a web site with flash. An uneducated guess, but it may have something to do with the fact that it still uses 32bit wrappers for the adobe plugin.