I have not been able to get flashplayer 9.0 to run on my laptop. I was able to get video to work but no sound no matter what I did. I tried again tonight to reinstall it and now it doesn't work at all. I was going to down grade back to flash 7.0 but I was not able to find it. I am running Debian Etch.
So does anyone know where to get flash 7. and will I be able to use it for viewing youtube etc. Or is it obsolete? I'm just real tired of this junk.
thanks

You may find that if you have a sound problem, swapping to an older version of flash will not solve it. It would be better to solve the sound problem. Having said that, IIRC, flash 7 used the OSS sound driver, where as flash 9 uses ALSA, so it might make a difference.

In my limited experience of working out audio problems, I find the most common cause is having a single-channel sound card and that there is some application which is hogging the card. This is usually some sort of sound server, most often esd. Do you know if you run a sound server program? If so, try disabling it.

If not, it's worth checking to see if esd is running (and hogging the soundcard). Run this command in a terminal:
If you see any lines of output, try killing the process(es).

I found a few annoying programs start esd without asking me. One guilty party is evolution. This is really annoying.

ALSA apps can share the soundcard even if it is only a single channel device - there is a software mixer extension called dmix. This works well for me for apps which use ALSA, but when some app which uses OSS grabs the card, it locks out all other programs until it is finished. You can sometimes run OSS apps inside a wrapper called aoss, which apparently can alleviate this problem, but I've never had any luck with it.

I'm using esd thats the only one that will give me sound. I had to configure Totem and Mplayer to use it. I have worked on this for 5 months now. a lot of people have this problem but I have not been able to solve it.
I have one small speaker so I need to use my logitec usb headphones plus I live in a tent.
I have posts all over the internet now about usb, sound, flash etc. So I wanted to try to down grade and see if that will work. I think there may be and issue between flash and esd, of course. I do not think the sound problem will be resolved. I'm hoping to order Mandriva 2008 soon and maybe it will fix some of this.

Did you try to kill all esd and then run firefox and test flash (I always use badgerbadgerbadger to test flash)? In that order. if you can verify that, we can try to help with a solution.

I pretty much gave up. Then for some reason I decided to try to get flash re-installed. Then for fun I killed esd and now I have sound in flash!!!! I have no idea what I have done even just over the last couple days to figure out how I got here.
I have totem configured for esd and it still works. However now Mplayer has no sound. I had it set to esd, I tried oss and no sound. then I tried alsa and it had sound but spewed errors, so I stopped it. I 'll figure that out.

Thats so awesome now I can watch Big Bill Hells used cars on youtube...
thanks Alan