December 8, 2009

Enable Flash on Google Chrome Beta in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Today Google released Google Chrome Beta for Linux/mac.

This is the actual Google branded version of Chromium which has been available on Linux for quite some time now.  I installed Google Chrome only to find out that Flash did not Work on it.  Being no stranger to flash not working on linux, I poked around a bit until I found a solution.

UPDATE: It appears that Flash will work if you import your settings from Firefox when you install it, however if you’re a Chromium user and did not import any settings when you installed Chrome this should fix you right up.

The following applies to my experience with Ubuntu 9.10 64bit and Google Chrome Beta 64bit.

I’ll assume that you are already using Flash in Firefox or Google Chromium.

Fist we’re going to find your flash plugin: Open up a terminal window and type (always leaving out the quotations)

“sudo updatedb”

This will update the database that “locate” uses to find things with. Next we’ll use locate to find your flash plugin.

“locate libflashplayer.so”

That should show you the location of your Flash plugin, something like “/usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so” or “/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so”

What we need to do is make a directory for the plugin in the default Google Chrome install directory which is “/opt/google/chrome/”

so back to the terminal window and type

“cd /opt/google/chrome”

now once there type:

“sudo mkdir plugins”

Now we need to copy libflashplayer.so to the newly created plugins directory

“sudo cp /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins/”

make sure to replace the bold /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libflashplayer.so with the output of your previous search “locate libflashplayer.so”

Once that’s done Youtube and all other flash sites should work perfectly well on Google Chrome Beta

December 3, 2009

My first Chrome Extension – Simple Print

I’ve been really enjoying Google Chrome lately.

I had been a big fan of Firefox for many years, but after playing around for a while with the dev channel versions of Chrome -called Chromium- I have come to really appreciate the speed increase I get using Chrome/Chromium instead of Firefox. Now that Chrome has the ability to have addons – extensions as they’re called in Chrome – I have very little need for Firefox anymore.  There are however some things from Firefox that I miss. Small things, like the ability to have a “Print” button on your toolbar.  So I scrounged around a bit and after some trial and error I came up with my first chrome plugin “Simple Print”

It is very, very simple.  All it does it put a print button on your chrome bar.  You click the button and it brings up a print dialog.  That’s it.  It may get more features eventually, but for now, It is just a print button.

Simple Print Screenshot

If you’re interested you can download and install it here!

Simple Print
Simple Print

UPDATE:  I’m on the official Google Chrome Extensions Gallery

Note that you will need to have the beta or  dev channel version of Chrome installed.  you can find that here http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/ or here http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

I have tested this on Ubuntu 9.10, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 it seems to work on all of them.

It’s a super simple addon, but if you’re interested in the source code drop me a line. The icon used came from the “humanitarian” gnome icon theme available here.

EDIT:

There seems to be some problems with my extension right now (not printing or printing blank pages only) I’m working hard to figure it out, when I’ve got it I’ll update it here and if you have it installed it should automatically update your copy as well. I have reason to believe that it (and the two other print extensions that have since popped up) are broken because of this bug http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29621