[SOLVED] Videos not playing, flash plug-in crashed

I am back again with another problem. I have to first say this forum is the fastest one I have found for answering problems. Thanks so much for a great forum.

Now to my problem. I have installed Zorin OS 7 core to an older Emachine. It has a 1.8 Ghz AMD Athlon XP processor with 2 GB of ram. I have installed an AGP video card. The card is a Geforce 64 MB DDR MX440 8X card. This is an Nvidia card. I followed the directions of going into recovery mode and turning on the network and going into terminal and using apt-add repository and apt-get update and apt-get install I downloaded the Nvidia drivers. I then used control, alt, delete to restart and everything seemed to be OK.

However when I tried to view videos on the internet I got flash player plug-in missing. I installed VLC and that did not help. So I used Synaptic and found Flash Player installer and ran that. After rebooting and trying again I got flash player crashed in both Opera and Chrome.

When I looked at Nvidia X Server settings it says I don't appear to be using Nvidia X driver. And that I should run "nvidia-xconfig" as root. When I do that it seems to work and I get a message that a file has been written to xconfig. However after rebooting if I look at the Nvidia X Server settings again I still get the same message that I appear to not be using nvidia X driver.

At this point I am not sure if my flash player crashing is because of the X driver not being set up right or if it is caused by something else. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Carroll

I just realized I posted this in "Installation". Can someone please move it to "Help and Support"? Thanks

Hi,

first make sure you are using the PPA posted here:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2490

After installing your Nvidia drivers, did you do a full system update?, use the following command in a terminal:

Code:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

and restart your PC after updating!.

Regards Wolfman

Thanks for the reply. I had used the info from the link you posted and used the edgers ppa. I just tried the update commands you gave and in both cases it said no updates. Another thing going on is the resolution is very low. When I look at display in system settings it says laptop, but it is not a laptop. The resolution is 800 x 600. I followed the link that was posted for resolution problems where you go into terminal and edit the X11 file for no edids modes. As far as I can tell that did not change anything either. I am beginning to think Zorin just does not work well with Nvidia. I have another PC that I can run the Live DVD for Zorin 7 on it and everything works fine. That one has ATI Radeon video. However I do not want to install Zorin on that machine because I need it for some other projects.

Any more ideas?

Carroll

Hi,

I can only assume that it didn't update correctly as you should have had several updates for "mesa and x11" packages, check out the update guide and change your software sources download location and add the "Prereleased Updates" too:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2247

Restart in recovery mode and run "DPKG" per the guide using a network cable and then run the updates, restart your PC with Ctrl + Alt + Del, do not click on "Resume"!.

Regards Wolfman

A little more information would be helpful - is the nVidia 'card' a card or chipset? Whatever it is a model number would be most useful!

First I want to say thanks to whoever moved my thread to the proper place.

I am inclined to think the reason I didn't get any new updates is because as I explained in the first post I had followed all the steps in the How To section in the thread about your screen turning black or white if you have an Nvidia card. As I said I did the apt-get and apt install etc. and restarted by using control, alt, delete. and then using recovery again and turning on net manager and using DPKG and then restarting again using cn,alt,del and finally after booting all the way up going to Synaptic and marking the appropriate things there. When I did the first few things I downloaded a few hundred megabytes of data. However Synaptic did not seem to download any more.

Also as I said in the first post I have installed a video "card" with an Nvidia "chipset". Again it is an AGP Geforce "card" model MX440 8X with 64 MB of DDR ram.

I have found a place in AWN that appears to be where you can change your monitors size. However nothing seems to happen when I try that. Looking at "display" in "system settings" it only shows that I have a laptop which is NOT correct. My monitor is Dell flat screen 15". The cable is a regular SVGA cable. My resolution keeps dropping each time reboot. I am now down to 640 by 480 which of course does not work very well either.

If I can answer any other questions please ask.

Thanks again for trying to help.

Carroll

I am aware that the MX440 was a bad card for GNU/Linux - that said I have come across Sabayon users using that card without issue on earlier releases of Sabayon - it could be it is the Graphics Card that cannot cope with the current drivers - did it work ok in Live mode with Zorin?

That was a good question as I didn't really remember if it ran ok in Live mode or not. Well I just tried it and Zorin 7 core gets to a white curser and a black screen and just stops. Since I also had a DVD of 7 Lite I decided to try it. It works fine in live mode. I am even using it to make this post. It also recognizes the monitor and will even let me change the resolution.

I would have thought the core version would have been more likely to work than the lite version. The only problem with the lite version is I really like Libre Office which comes in the core version. But I may have to install the lite version and then add what I want to get it the way I want it. Running in live mode it still will not play videos from the internet but maybe the proper plug-ins will solve that.

Thanks for the help. I'll keep working on it and see what else I can learn.

Carroll

Hi Carroll,

with a 64MB graphics card; you would be better off with Zorin Lite!.

You can install Libreoffice once you have installed the system no problem!. Don't forget to remove Abiword to save disk space.

Let us know how things turn out.

Regards Wolfman

Well after spending several hours at it I have finally gotten Zorin 7 Lite working correctly I think on my old Emachine. The videos still did not want to work after a full install. I upgraded all the files and checked a lot of things and also installed Gnash and VLC but still could not get any videos to play. I kept getting the message that the flash player had crashed. I finally found some info that said Adobe Flash Player no longer supported the older processors that did not have some function. I think it was Xee2 or something like that. So I tried again to install some other kind of flash player but could not get it to work either. Then I realized I still had Adobe Flash Player installed. So using Synaptic I told it to totally remove the Adobe package and now videos work fine! So if you have an older processor just don't even install Adobe or uninstall it if it is already installed. Then I think either Gnash or VLC would work OK. I still have them both on this machine and they don't seem to be interfering with one another.

Thanks for all the help. I will mark this solved.

Carroll

Hi Carroll,

I am glad you are sorted, I just want to point out a small matter about "Flash" and Linux as it often causes confusion for some people, Flash player is still supported under Linux, it is just that there will be no new versions available but it will come with bug fixes now and again!. Google Chrome comes with its own version of Flash I beiieve.

See also:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/186779/w ... -for-linux

Regards Wolfman