Adobe Flash and Ubuntu

[edwardp-mh2Nk+tgbQM at public.gmane.org (edwardp-mh2Nk+tgbQM at public.gmane.org)]

Chris O'Connell wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> After my father's 5th virus infestation on his laptop he has expressed an
> interest in trying out Linux.  He has 4 primary expectations of his laptop
> running Linux:
> 1.  Web browsing
> 2.  Listening to music
> 3.  Viewing MS Office documents
> 4.  Watching streaming videos
>
> His hardware is certainly adequate enough (or at least, I would think it to
> be).  He has a Dell Inspiron 1150 with 2GB of RAM and a 2.6GHZ celeron
> processor.  The machine is rather old, but runs XP like a breeze.
>
> After a very, very rocky start attempting to try to install Ubuntu 10.04
> from a CD I was forced to download Ubuntu 9.10.  The install went OK, but
> slowly.  After bringing the system up, running the updates and joining the
> laptop to the wireless network the first thing I went to try was YouTube.
>   The video is simply unwatchable due to extreme choppyness and lag.  After
> googling for a while I was presented with a couple of solutions.
> 1.  Install SWIFTFOX
> 2.  Set the CPU to scale all the way up when a demand was placed.
>
> Swiftfox did nothing for me (nor did Google Chrome).  I found the CPU does
> not support scaling, which indicates to me that the CPU is always running at
> full speed.
>
> I just can't for the life of me figure out why this machine, which runs
> without an issue for the first 3 tasks my father wants, can't watch a simple
> flash video off from YouTube.
>
> Does anyone have any recommendations?
>
> I would hate my father to lose interest in one of my passions (Linux) over
> something as silly as a Flash Video.
>
> PS, I know flash sucks and I hate it too, but let's face it, the technology
> is embedded in tons of sites so we are stuck with it for now.
>
> Chris
>    

I can tell you that the only Flash Player browser plugin that (and I 
hesitate to say) "works" with Ubuntu 10.04 on this machine, is a beta 
plugin of version 10.1 from the Adobe Labs web site.

The reason why I hesitate to say "works" is that although it will 
display flash ads, it does not work well with multimedia.  For example, 
a YouTube video will display a blank screen with this particular Flash 
version and when playing AOL Radio, the selected channel only plays one 
song, then stops.  It should play continuously.

I have also tried every Flash player beginning with the first one they 
made available for Linux (under version 9) as well as under version 10.0 
and had issues at AOL DailyFinance (www.dailyfinance.com) with all of 
them.  When the succeeding page loads in after requesting a stock quote, 
four small ads for brokerages begin to load in at the upper left of the 
page, then a large white space appears.

The beta of 10.1 does not cause the white space to appear and the entire 
page appears as expected, but 10.1 is causing issues on this machine 
with YouTube and AOL Radio as noted above.