Adobe Flash does not work out of the box with Chromium

Opensuse 13.2 fresh install yesterday, did all of the updates and installed Chromium from yast.

Youtube and Pandora work straight out of the box using Firefox.

Youtube and Pandora does NOT work on Chormium out of the box, saying flash is not installed. Obviously flash is installed, but somehow Chormium is not looking in the right area.

I’m sure there is some work around or fix (please provide info), but I’m disspointed that is 2015 and we are STILL at a point where very popular apps are not working out of the box. If I installed the official release of Windows 10 and downloaded Chrome and flash didnt work, entire teams at Microsoft would be getting fired.

And yes, this may be (and probably is) some issue with Chormium in particular, and I would give some slack of I manually compiled and installed Chormium from source, but this is prepackaged in Yast. It should work 100% out of the box.

It works 100% out of the box, Flash is an optional plugin - not part of Chromium. You’re confusing it with Chrome which ships with Flash by default.

For Chromium you need to install chromium-pepper-flash from Packman, the old Flash won’t work.

Thanks for this info, I will try when I get home. But lets address the following below.

This is my point, why doesn’t the prepackaged Chromium (at least the version that ships with Opensuse) include flash by default like Chrome does?

If I were to make an educated guess it’s because they wanted to ship it free of any proprietary plugins as openSUSE is meant to be fully ‘free as in free’ software. Perhaps there are licensing and/or patent issues that make it impossible to distribute it with the OS itself without breaking GPL, most likely it’s because pepper-flash is a binary blob and does not have sources available.

I do not fully know why but it has always been like this.

I suppose like you said there are reasons. And while Linux distros “out of the box” workability has improved tremendously over the past decade, it’s little things like this that still keep it out of reach for the vast majority of users…

On the other hand Windows 8 and 8.1 have had more vulnerabilities than any other Windows before them in a year and 1/3rd of those vulnerabilities have been caused by the flash plugin that ships with the OS.

I’d rather the distribution doesn’t force Flash on you when it’s been deemed as one of the most insecure applications ever made and almost every single vulnerability is remotely exploitable and are able to bypass security measures (in the case of Windows, UAC giving the attacker system/admin level access on the compromised system).

I think that this is it. Chromium is FOSS but the pepper-flash is not and therefore they cannot include it with the DVD or the OSS repositories. That is why you have to add a 3rd party repository because it is YOU who are making the changes and providing the means to do that, not openSUSE.

OpenJDK is available because it is open source, but Oracle Java is not.

Plus, you need to accept the EULA for Java and Flash.

On Wed, 18 Feb 2015 21:16:01 +0000, Fusion916 wrote:

> I suppose like you said there are reasons. And while Linux distros “out
> of the box” workability has improved tremendously over the past decade,
> it’s little things like this that still keep it out of reach for the
> vast majority of users…

That’s a licensing/legal issue, not a technical issue. Push whatever
organizations you can (and law creating bodies) to take appropriate
action to deal with the issues surrounding software patents and patent
trolls, and this improves. Until then, expect to have problems like this
with proprietary stuff that costs money to legally license.

Jim


Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
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