Ubuntu 6.10 Beta Firefox and Flash Plugin Crash: a possible solution

After installing “Swiftfox”, an optimized version of Firefox 1.5, I discovered I still experienced crashes with the flash plugin. Clearly something else was wrong. So I ran firefox with strace on the CLI, and discovered the problem may be related to Xorg. Then I did some searching on the web and eventually discovered that Xorg on Edgy Eft has the composite extension enabled by default. Now I ask you, is that really a wise decision? Clearly not.
Anywho, if your system suffers from the same symptoms, just open xorg.conf in an editor like this:
~$ sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Then append the following lines of code:

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "0"
EndSection


The restart Xorg, try pressing CTRL-ALT-BKSP, or reboot, or dance a jig. Whatever works for you ;)
If all goes well, the Flash plugin should know work normally. Well, it does for me anyway.

Ubuntu 6.10 Beta: a very little review

After upgrading my Ubuntu 6.06.1 installation to “Edgy Eft”, I noticed a significant speed increase in … well just about everything really. But there are many things I still don’t like, and which I *hope* will be fixed in the final release.

To begin with, the graphics card in my laptop does not handle 24bit color. The graphics slow to a crawl, and playing movies is right out. But when I’m using the Flash 7 mozilla-plugin, it crashes Firefox “Bon Echo” immediately on loading a Flash site, UNLESS I run Xorg in 24bit color. Which is not an option. So I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. Isn’t life nice?

Also, the provided Totem plugin does not work well. Neither with gstreamer or xine engines, no matter what extra codecs and what-not I install. Neither does the mplayerplug-in, but I’ll try building that myself, just to be sure.

And then the wireless connection. It has definitely gotten worse, the connection sometimes drops. Is it the restricted madwifi module? The kernel? The wpa_supplicant daemon? The gnome-networkmanager? I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. What universal knowledge or eternal wisdom will I gain from figuring out for myself which is broken? None. The system is “just” a tool to achieve an objective. I repeat: a tool, a tool, a TOOL! I do not study tools, I USE them. But I hope this is just a temporary situation until the final release this month.

To summarize: Boy, does everything load faster! The GNOME menu is a lot snappier, OpenOffice starts up twice as fast, Firefox loads much faster. Everything looks nice. And while it’s still getting me nowhere, at least it’s getting me there faster than ever before!