Posted November 18th, 2008 by Justin Warren
Here’s a quick look at seafelt v3.x from the work I’ve done on it today.
seafelt Performance Manager 3.x Element Performance Chart
Click to view full size.
Isn’t it pretty? 
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Tags: analytics, reporting, statistics
Posted November 18th, 2008 by Justin Warren
I’ve worked out how to get the Adobe Flash player version 10 working with Ubuntu Hardy on AMD64. It’s weird, and I’m not entirely sure why it works, but lots of people seem to be struggling with this, so hopefully some people find this useful.
This is what you’ll see in /var/log/messages when you attempt to load a website with Flash in it in Firefox 3:
npviewer.bin[25031]: segfault at 0 rip 0 rsp fff1ee60 error 14
npviewer.bin[25044]: segfault at 0 rip 0 rsp ffbc1b40 error 14
npviewer.bin[25054]: segfault at 0 rip 0 rsp ff801f40 error 14
npviewer.bin[25150]: segfault at 0 rip 0 rsp ff9fc870 error 14
The big problem appears to be this file:
/usr/lib32/libc.so.6
This is a symlink to libc-2.5.so. Now, that looked weird to me, since that looks like version 2.5 of libc. In fact, in /lib and /lib64, libc.so.6 links to libc-2.7.so. At a guess, the 32bit library for libc is an incompatible version with the 64bit libraries installed with Hardy. Delete the link, like this:
sudo rm /usr/lib32/libc.so.6
Flash then starts working properly.
You will probably also want to upgrade the package nspluginwrapper (which contains npviewer.bin) to at least version 1.0.0. I’ve gone ahead and compiled and installed version 1.1.4, downloaded from here. I’m not certain this is necessary, but I believe at least version 1.0.0 is needed to fix some bugs in npviewer.bin that are triggered by bugs in the Flash player. This is my nspluginwrapper configuration:
# nspluginwrapper -l
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
Original plugin: /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
Wrapper version string: 1.1.4
/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
Original plugin: /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
Wrapper version string: 1.1.4
/usr/lib/firefox/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
Original plugin: /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
Wrapper version string: 1.1.4
/usr/lib64/firefox/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
Original plugin: /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
Wrapper version string: 1.1.4
I’m not sure how the link gets set up, but I’d guess it’s something in the libc6 triggers that are called by APT when installations happen, because it keeps coming back even when I delete it, and Flash stops working again. If this happens to you, check to see if the link in /usr/lib32 is back, and if so, delete it again.
This is the combination that works for me:
- AMD Athlon 64 bit chip
- Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS)
- Linux kernel 2.6.24-21-generic
- Flash 10, downloaded from Adobe’s website
- firefox 3, package 3.0.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04
- nspluginwrapper 1.1.4, compiled from source
Let me know if this helps you get Flash working again, and we’ll get this fixed in the main build.
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Tags: adobe, amd64, firefox, flash, npviewer.bin, nspluginwrapper, ubuntu
Posted November 17th, 2008 by Justin Warren
I’ve managed to get the desktop upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy (8.04). It wasn’t all smooth sailing, unforunately.
Firstly, it seems no one uses IDE disks any more. Or that they’re all now accessed via a SCSI emulation layer. No matter, what used to be /dev/hda became /dev/sda, bumping all the other disks down own in the order. I used to boot from /dev/sdc, so when Ubuntu tried to restart, it couldn’t find the root disk any more. This fails weirdly and hard, because it attempts to mount the disk. Ubuntu will normally upgrade your menu.lst file (which defines where to find the boot things for grub, the boot loader), but this often breaks for me, because it likes to use UUIDs.
UUIDs uniquely identify disks (or filesystems, I’m not sure which), but I use a dd copied mirror (so I get an exact block copy), which has the same UUID as the boot disk. This confuses grub, and it sometimes boots from the backup disk, not the primary. That’s why I bypass the auto-upgrade, because it has previously auto-FUBARed my computer. So this time I had to manually fix the grub installation to match the new disk orderings.
Once that was done, I had to recompile the NVIDIA kernel drivers. Again. Now, everything works quite nicely, except for gdesklets and Flash. gdesklets has a bug somewhere that causes it to SEGFAULT constantly. It’s a known bug that’s been present for over a year, and no one seems to have any idea how to fix it. Which kinda sux.
Flash not working is a bigger problem. This is apparently another SEGFAULT inducing bug of some kind somewhere inside either Adobe’s Flash 10, or possibly nspluginwrapper, which I use to make 32bit things work inside and AMD64 based system.
So what have I learned from all this? AMD64 is a really tough platform for Linux as a desktop. I mean, Linux has about 3% total market share, and AMD64 is probably 10% of that. So when things don’t work all that well (which isn’t that often, but often enough), there are only 7 other people who can help you. If you’re going to use Linux, right at the moment, go with straight 32bit x86, not 64bit. There just isn’t a critical mass of people with 64bit desktops yet. Without a critical mass of users, developers (both open source, and proprietary. I’m looking at you, Adobe) don’t have the impetus to make their code work well in 64bit.
64bit is probably fine for servers, but for a desktop, 32bit is the way to go.
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Tags: adobe, flash, gdesklets, hardy, ubuntu
