I had some difficulties playing Flash videos lately. Problems ranged from lagging sound, to ugliness, to idling black screens, to strange gray Play buttons that didn't do anything. The following solved my Flash issues on Ubuntu.

A very short & simple article this time.

You could take the graphical approach (use Synaptic & visit Adobe site), but I'm using commandline cause copy-pasting is really fast and concise, so here we go:

Cleanup

Open a terminal and type:

$ sudo echo -n "Cleaning up... "
$ sudo aptitude purge swfdec-mozilla
$ sudo aptitude purge adobe-flashplugin
$ sudo echo "[done]"

Install Adobe Flashplayer 10 on Ubuntu

Open a terminal and type:

$ sudo echo -n "Downloading... " \
 && pushd /tmp \
 && wget https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_10_linux.deb \
 && sudo echo "[done]" \
 && sudo echo -n "Installing... " \
 && sudo aptitude install libcurl3 \
 && sudo dpkg -i ./install_flash_player_10_linux.deb \
 && popd
 && sudo echo "[done]" \

That's it

Restart Firefox and go & enjoy some Youtube videos again :)