I've run into this problem on Debian before and narrowed the problem down to audio. Macromedia coded the linux port of flash to only use /dev/dsp (said to be fixed in Macromedia's next
release for linux, but I believe unavailable at this time) and /dev/dsp will only allow one application to use
it. When flash tries to open /dev/dsp if something else (i.e. gnome, esd, older applications) also has the audio device open.<br><br>The most interesting way to fix this problem is to install alsa-oss and change the global config file for firefox /etc/
<br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">1. FIREFOX_DSP="aoss" in /etc/firefox/firefoxrc and /etc/mozilla-firefox/mozilla-firefoxrc (by now it's set to "alsa09")<br>
2. The alsa-oss package installed (by now it's not installed by default)<br>
3. The autoaudiosink used by default for gstreamer (I think alsasink is used now instead)<br></div><br>Number 3 is talking about changing the gstreamer-properties.<br><br>I got the above tip from an Ubuntu bug comment <br>
<a href="http://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/29760">http://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/29760</a><br><br>Previously I have use libesd-alsa0 which worked pretty well if you tweaked the /etc/esound/esd.conf to make esd drop the /dev/dsp connection after 5 seconds of inactivity and set gstreamer-properties to output through alsa. But that meant that I had to turn off gnome sounds because it was never giving up the esd control which made the next application hang/wait until esd was idle.
<br><br>I just started trying the alsa-oss fix on my home computer and haven't really put it through any sort of paces. It looked like everything worked but I'm not sure if I have called 2 sound apps at the same time. Let me know if this works for you.
<br><br>-- <br>Jeff Rasmussen
<br>GPG public key 0x9686C12F