Hi there,
I run a 2008 Thinkpad R61i with the Intel X3100 video GPU on the 965GM chipset. I recently updated from Slackware 13.1 to 14.1 on this machine. I keep
/home on a separate partition and this is the first upgrade with that setup.
I installed Chrome 38 from the Slackbuild in
/extra. I also installed the flashplayer-plugin from
/extra, though I don't think that has any bearing on this (see below).
When in Chrome, if I play any video content, the laptop's video stops output entirely. Even if when close X down and return to the console (I still boot to command line and invoke
startx to launch Openbox, and can close it gracefully), the video doesn't work.
I can easily play videos in Firefox without issue, and play local video content, so the hardware itself doesn't seem at fault. I'm of a mind that it's Chrome's PepperFlash causing issues.
I moved
~/.config/google-chrome/ to
~/.config/google-chrome_backup/ and relaunched Chrome, let it create a new config hierarchy, and the problem persisted. I had thought that maybe some profile setting had been corrupted or such. If so, this didn't fix it. I can go to the Google Dashboard and "Stop and Clear" synchronizing to force a refresh but I'm not sure that would address the issue.
I
had thought that Chrome would "recognize
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins as a valid plugin directory" per the Slackbuild, but maybe this is no longer the case given that Chrome stopped support for NPAPI architecture as of version 35, that is, I (now) assume that Mozilla's plugin is unsupported and that the PepperFlash plugin is the only game in Chrome.
All this preamble now out of the way, two questions:
- is there a way to force Chrome to either update PepperFlash or to use another plugin; and
- if this happens again, should I (carefully) modprobe i915 to reload the video driver?