ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

Flashdance

Until recently, Adobe's support for Flash in 64 bit Linux environments has been pretty much non existent. Those of us who have made the jump have had to make do with nspluginwrapper, which enables the Netscape plugins to run on architectures (such as x64) that they were not written for. The experience offered by this solution was seriously sub par, and was almost a show stopper issue for me when deciding whether or not to make the switch to Linux.

This all changed when Adobe started releasing Alphas of the Flash 10 player for x64 linux distros. Finally we can run the flash plugin natively, ditching the horrid performance and "gray screen of death" that was commonly associated with nspluginwrapper.

It took me about 20 seconds to set up the new plugin using this guide from Softpedia. I uninstalled nspluginwrapper, created a plugin directory as instructed and copied in the libflashplayer.so file. Then I reboot firefox and....

Argh! The performance was even worse than before! What was going on?

A quick scan of top told me that a process called gtk-gnash was eating 100% of one of my 4 CPU cores. I had found the culprit. Unfortunately Ubuntu comes with a horrible open source flash implementation called gnash. The nspluginwrapper implementation had successfully kept it at bay, but now that was gone, leaving me exposed to the CPU usage equivalent of Unicron that is gnash.

After uninstalling everything to do with gnash and giving the system a quick restart for good measure, seeing as gnash had successfully crashed ALSA and a few other core systems, and I was up and running. Finally I can enjoy watching mind numbing Youtube videos and playing benign Flash games at a speed more befitting of my Quad Core box with 8 Gb of RAM!