For about 2 years I have suffered with this problem. Now, as flash movies become more and more popular, it is becoming an issue I need to resolve. The flash plugin, installed in Firefox, works for video, but with a standard installation there is no sound. This has so far affected Mepis and Slackware distributions, using Firefox 2 and 3 (and several updates of both).

For a while I had a good workaround; with Flash 9 in use, I compiled libflashsupport.so from
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php...port_for_Linux and added it to the Firefox plugins directory; this gave me working audio, but at the expense of exclusive use of the sound hardware. I would have to close the web page with the embedded flash object in order to use any other sound application.

Now I am using Slackware 12.1 and Firefox 3, and I tried upgrading to flash 10. There was a theory that the libflashsupport was redundant with flash 10, which could use Alsa instead of OSS. Result; no sound at all, neither with nor without the libflashsupport. I went back to flash 9; no sound without libflashsupport (which I re-compiled for the new system); with libflashsupport, the sound works as before (blocks everything else), but with the new drawback that the actual audio is preceded by a burst of extremely loud noise. If I have my big speakers on for music, and forget about this, I am deaf for the rest of the day! It really is unpleasant. I try to remember to mute the audio before starting flash play, and then unmute it when it's running -- but I sometimes forget. Not good.

I have no other audio problems of any kind, and use a very standard sound card (Ensoniq 1370). Perhaps somebody can shed some new light on this problem...?

So you know that something like "mplayer" will play video and sound? Have you tried to install the "alsa-oss" package for slackware?
http://slackware.mirrors.pair.com/sl....17-i486-1.tgz
And you use the generic flash installer from adobe for Flash 10?
Make sure that "about:config" shows that it's loading the correct Flashplugin and not some old one. You might need to clean out some old plugins.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes -- I use mplayer all the time to watch movies. XMMS for audio files, and the command line progs mpg123, ogg123, flac123. No problems with any of them. And Skype works fine too.

alsa-oss is installed. I can use both alsa and oss outputs for audio; both work. I believe flash 10 is supposed to be able to use alsa natively, which is why it can work without libflashsupport. There is code in libflashsupport.c for alsa, but it does not compile; only the OSS stuff works. As I said, this lib does not work at all with flash 10, which is supposed to make it superfluous.

Yes, the correct plugin is loaded in Firefox. I have checked.

There are no other copies of the flash plugin anywhere on my system.
I have Firefox in my home directory (updating it is easier that way). Plugins are in ~/firefox/plugins, and nowhere else.

To recap --

-with flash 9 and libflashsupport both loaded I get sound, after an initial burst of high amplitude noise

-with flash 10 I have not been able to get sound at all, with or without libflashsupport.

Have you tryed a live CD like ubuntu to see if flash works on that? Just so we can know that it's a slackware and mepis issue and not your hardware compatibility with flash.

OK -- good idea.

I happened to have a copy of a recent version of Ubuntu lying around. I booted it, loaded Firefox, and tried flash; nothing. No flash plugin. OK, install it, and restart. Check with about:plugins -- yes, libflashflashplayer 10 is loaded. Tried flash; sound works fine - just like that!

So for a direct comparison I copied the libflashplayer.so which had just worked to a USB stick. Then I shut down and booted Slackware, and dropped this file into my plugins directory. Result - video fine, but no sound, just as before. Back to my flash9 + flash support, and also as before; works after a huge burst of noise. One other problem I have not previously mentioned is that flash working this way gives me severe de-sync between audio and video; they can easily be 2 seconds apart.

Obviously flash sound works with my hardware, so this is purely a software problem.

Well then this might be something that could be posted on the Slackware forum. Cuz I'm not really sure what the problem is. Though I do know that ubuntu uses pulseaudio by default. So you can try that...
http://slackbuilds.org/repository/12...io/pulseaudio/

I do remember having this problem once upon a time back when I still used Slackware as a Desktop. But I don't remember if I ever fixed it or not. Anyways... Not sure what else to say...

you say you are compiling the open source swf and flashplayer support. I have never heard problems the adobe binary flshplayer.so . this could be the arts server issue. the time it takes for the server to change from one app to another or the time for reset.
I guess I am going to have to compile the open source stand alone flash player and check this out. this is a new one on me.

Drakeo,
No, sorry if I confused this issue. I am using the regular binary libflashplayer.so downloaded from Adobe as provided in the flash installer. It is only the libflashsupport.so which I have to compile from source code, as Adobe does not provide a binary. My first post in this thread contains a link to the page from which this code can be downloaded. Compiling and installing this library is the only way I have been able to get flash audio working at all.

Dankles,
This is not really a SLackware specific problem. I was using Mepis (a debian-based distro) when I first encountered this problem, and it persisted through an upgrade to a newer version of Mepis, and now through a switch to Slackware. I did consider posting this in the Slackware forum, but the above consideration persuaded me otherwise. Yes, I know Ubuntu uses pulseaudio. I do not really want to use that, as most of the audio applications I use require either alsa or oss. Do you happen to know of a live CD distro which uses alsa? It might be worth trying that.

you may want to try the slack build