Fix Adobe Flash Player is using ALSA instead of PulseAudio

2017-10-25

On my laptop I’m running Linux Mint Debian Edition.

I use Firefox, and everytime I opened a site where the Adobe Flash Player was used, VLC stopped playing music.

I vaguely remembered that some programs use ALSA to direct access the soundcard.

But PulseAudio needs exclusive access to the soundcard to work properly.

So I checked what program was using the soundcard:

user@box ~ $ fuser -v /dev/snd/*
                     USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  ikem     16017 F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/controlC1:  ikem     16017 F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/pcmC1D0p:   ikem     16031 F...m plugin-containe

The “plugin-container” was using the soundcard. And “plugin-container” usual means “flash”.

So I was opening Firefox about:plugins page and looked at Shockwave Flash, which showed me the path to the plugin:

/opt/mint-flashplugin-11/libflashplayer.so

I checked if there is another package which provides libflashplayer.so:

user@box ~ $ apt-file search libflashplayer.so
flashplayer-mozilla: /usr/lib/flashplayer-mozilla/libflashplayer.so
mint-flashplugin-11: /opt/mint-flashplugin-11/libflashplayer.so
mint-flashplugin-24: /opt/mint-flashplugin-24/libflashplayer.so

And I thought: “What if I replace mint-flashplugin with flashplayer-mozilla?”

So I run:

sudo apt-get remove mint-flashplugin-11 mint-flashplugin-24
sudo apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla

And another:

user@box ~ $ fuser -v /dev/snd/*
                     USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  ikem     16023 F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/controlC1:  ikem     16023 F.... pulseaudio
/dev/snd/pcmC1D0p:   ikem     16023 F...m pulseaudio

Showed me, PulseAudio was being used.

Case closed.