Flash Player Switcher

[rcrsn51]

This is a tray applet that turns Adobe Flash Player on/off. It simply renames /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so to libflashplayer.so.off and back again.

It takes effect on the next restart of your browser.

If the applet is working correctly, it should change colour when you click on it. But it occasionally does not load properly into the tray and needs:

Code: Select all

 jwm -restart

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[Semme]

Convenient, though after initially permitting a site, you'd still have to reload your browser to discontinue play.

For most folks however, far easier than revisiting a browsers preference panel.

Nice addition.. Thanks.

[rcrsn51]

Thanks for testing. This applet is not intended to be a site-by-site blocker. There are Flash-blocking plugins for that.

Now that Youtube does HTML5, I find it easier to leave Flash off most of the time and only turn it on when needed.

[Semme]

I understand and agree. Having had something similar in place, it should prove handy for others.

[Mike Walsh]

Hallo, Bill.

Very neat little applet, I must say. Just out of curiosity, d'you think it would be possible to make this work with PepperFlash? Having extracted it, and had a look, I see it's operated by a binary in /root/Startup.

Did you manufacture the binary yourself? Or did you adapt it from elsewhere?


Mike.

[Pelo]

excellent ! just what i am needing right now. Desactivate Flashplayer allows me downloading free music to my jukebox, aqualung to-day.

[rcrsn51]

Did you manufacture the binary yourself?

Here is the source.

[Mike Walsh]

Thanks, Bill.

I'll have a look into this when time permits, and see if I can't hone my compiling skills a bit further..! Much appreciated.

Cheers.


Mike.

[rcrsn51]

Does pepperflash use an equivalent to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so? Where is it located?

[Mike Walsh]

Morning, Bill.

Does pepperflash use an equivalent to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so? Where is it located?

Short answer; I wish..! The trouble with Pepper is that its location is totally non-standard, depending on which of the Chromium-based browsers you're looking at......and is the reason why I've had to make so many different versions of my PepperFlash .pets.

I'll give you a few examples:-

Chrome: /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so

Chromium: Prior to version 37, it was in /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/libpepflashplayer.so. From 37-42, it was at /usr/lib/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so. And from 43 onwards, it moved inside the Chromium directory, at /usr/lib/chromium/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so.

Nightmare.

SlimJet has it inside the Slimjet directory.

Iron wants it in /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin, alongside libflashplayer.so.

Vivaldi creates a new directory at /usr/lib/pepperflashplugin-nonfree, and sticks it in there..!!

It's impossible to make a 'default' .pet of it that everybody can use......although there have been rumours floating around for a while that all the Chromium-based browsers will eventually standardise on /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin, along with NPAPI Flash. This is the location preferred by not only Canonical, but many of the RPM-based distros, too.

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I've always been a fan of the Chromium-based browsers. I run the same four browsers in every Pup, from a remote partition, sym-linked into each Pup where it expects to find them.

To make matters easier, I have a PepperFlash directory in this same remote partition, beside the browsers, along with other 'relevant' directories (/usr, /root, etc.) This is then sym-linked into each browser at the correct location, to simplify matters further still.

Which means I only need to update Pepper twice, each time a new version comes out; once for 32-bit, once for 64-bit (I have a separate 'AMD64' directory in the remote partition for the 64-bit stuff).....and all the browsers get the new version.

In fact, I don't even need to do it manually any longer. Our Russian colleague, SFS, came up with a modified auto-update script for Pepper, which works in the same manner as Geoff's Flash Auto-updater. It sits in /root/Startup of every Pup, and checks for a new version at every boot. If it finds a new one, it automatically upgrades it for you.

(I've included SFS's Pepper update script below. Just remove the '.zip' extension, make it executable, modify the paths for your particular needs, and stick it in /root/Startup. Or you can just run it from the terminal, manually.....it'll tell you what it's doing. It'll work equally well for 64-bit versions.)

So, just to see if this would work, I used the source code and build script you supplied, modified the paths for my 'common' PepperFlash directories everywhere it was necessary, and re-manufactured the .pet, along with new, home-made icons.

It works a treat. I, too, prefer to use HTML5 wherever possible, and it's so much easier if the browser can't actually find Pepper in the first place..!

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I built it in X-Slacko 2.3.2 last night. Here it is running in Precise 5.7.1:-

"OFF":-





.....and "ON":-





You can see your original further to the right.

You're a bloody genius, Bill.....I don't know where we Puppians would be without you..!

Thanks for publicising your code, mate. It's very much appreciated. Cheers!


Mike.

[rcrsn51]

Nice work. I thought about replacing /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so with a link to the location of the actual pepperflash.so. That way, you would not have to change the applet code for different Chromes.

But it didn't work. The link file would turn on/off, but the target .so file would remain active and the browser would find it.

[Mike Walsh]

Hallo, Bill.

Yes, well; this is why I find it advantageous to set everything up so that my libpepflashplayer.so lives in one, fixed location. It takes some doing, initially, including liberal use of Puppy's very powerful sym-link function (!!).....but it pays off in the end.

And the build-script really simplified things.

Thanks again.


Mike.

[rcrsn51]

Here's a variation that should be more flexible.

1. Create the hidden config file /root/.flashplayer_switcher
2. Add ONE line at the TOP with the full path to the plugin.so file, like

Code: Select all

/opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so

3. Start the applet.
4. It will read the path from the config file and redirect the applet to turn that file on/off.

[keniv]

@rcrsn51
Am using your first post version in lucid 5287. Working well including the icon colour change.

Thanks,

Ken.

[Pelo]

It is worth an addition on French forum, please cross the channel just by clicking the blue