How to Enable Flash Support in Google Chrome in Ubuntu

The Chromium team has released an alpha unstable version of the Google Chrome for Linux and Mac platform. Those who are keen to try out Google Chrome in their Ubuntu machine, but are not willing to run it under wine, you can now grab the deb file and install it in your system.

One of the limitation of Google Chrome in Linux is that it does not support flash. If you intend to use it to watch your favorite YouTube channel, then you are out of luck. Luckily, there is a little trick that you can use to overcome this limitation. If you have installed the Adobe Flash player for your Firefox browser, you can now use the same player to run flash script in Google Chrome.

Installation

If you have not installed Google Chrome (unstable), go to the Chromium dev channel and grab the respective deb file for your system (32-bit and 64-bit). Double click on the deb file to start the installation. The whole process shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.

Check for Adobe Flash player

If you have previously installed the Adobe Flash Player in your system, you should be able to find the libflashplayer.so file in the /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer directory. However, if you have installed the Flash player via the ubuntu-restricted-extra package, the libflashplayer.so will be located at the /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin directory instead.

To find out where your libflashplayer.so is located, you might want to do a search in Nautilus.

If you have not installed Flash Player, run the command in your terminal to install it:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Installing the Flash plugin

Create a plugins folder in the Google Chrome directory

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

Copy the libflashplayer.so file to the plugins folder.

sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins

Note: change the source path if your libflashplayer.so file is not located at other location.

Editing the Application menu

Right click at the Application menubar and select “Edit Menus”

Scroll down to find “Internet” on the left pane and select Google Chrome on the right. Click on the Properties button on the right side.

In the Command field, change the command to

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --enable-plugins %U

Save and close all the windows.

The flash player should be working in your Google Chrome now.