HOWTO FIX FIREFOX / FLASH PLUGIN SOUND ISSUE

Firefox has problems handling flash sound on several systems, especially if audio from another application is being played when Firefox loads its plugin cache.  I have tested this fix in Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper.  Someone from a different distribution please test this and give me feedback on whether it works for you as well!!


1. Close all instances of Firefox and/or Mozilla.
2. Open a terminal and issue the following command:
sudo gedit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc
3. Change the file so that it contains:
FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

4. Save and exit gedit.

5.  If you don't already have the Alsa OSS wrappers installed please install them via sudo apt-get install alsa-oss  (non-debian/ubuntu users please use your distributions package management or build the alsa-oss package from source).

6. Ubuntu users issue the following commands from your terminal:
mkdir /tmp/.esd/
touch /tmp/.esd/socket
sudo ln -s / sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /usr/lib/libesd.so.1

7. Now create a simple bash script that will do the first 2 parts of step 6 at boot, in ubuntu do the following:
sudo gedit /etc/init.d/flashfix.sh
-copy and paste the following to the file and save-
#!/bin/bash
mkdir /tmp/.esd/
touch /tmp/.esd/socket
exit

now issue the command:
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/flashfix.sh  && sudo update-rc.d flashfix.sh defaults


I know this seems like a lot to do, but hopefully it will get your flash sound to working properly. 

For further assistance or if you have any feedback please join #linuxsociety on irc.freenode.net, if you don't happen to have an IRC client installed use our web based IRC :)

Written by ttyfscker on 09232006