skullbochs

Almost the only piece of non-free software I’d been using on my Trisquel GNU/Linux box was Adobe Flash, so that I could watch YouTube videos. It’s always iffy whether you’re going to be able to watch YouTube videos with libswfdec.

But early this morning, while watching the live feed of Democracy Now!, I paused the video to try to watch an .ogv I was ripping with Thoggen. No dice. So, I decided to try listening to a podcast with Banshee. Same problem: wouldn’t even start. So, I started cursing GNOME, assuming for some reason that the old problem of only one application being able to use the sound-system at a time had come back. So, I close the browser and try again. Nope.

So, I tried re-opening the browser and watching the video again. The browser hung. I opened the Terminal to kill it. The Terminal opened and immediately hung. I tried closing the two and re-opening. Nope. I tried restarting X, but it gave me a blank screen when I logged back in. Finally, I just restarted the whole machine, uninstalled Adobe Flash and installed libswfdec.

I can’t watch all YouTube videos, but at least my computer’s not crashing because Adobe doesn’t care about their GNU/Linux users.