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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Pepper Flash Player Installer For Chromium Available In The Ubuntu 14.04 Repositories

A Pepper Flash Player installer for Chromium browser has been added to the official Ubuntu 14.04 repositories.

Pepper Flash Player Chromium Browser Ubuntu Trusty

As many of you already know, the latest Adobe Flash Player is available for Linux only through Google Chrome while other browsers are stuck with version 11.2. Further more, Flash 11.2 will stop working in Chromium because it uses the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI), which Chromium will stop supporting this year.

For these reasons, an Adobe Flash Player Pepper installer has been added to the official Ubuntu 14.04 repositories, imported from Debian.

This installer downloads Google Chrome, unpacks it, extracts Pepper Flash and sets it up so it can be used in Chromium browser.

Install Pepper Flash Player for Chromium in Ubuntu 14.04

1. To use Pepper Flash Player in Chromium browser under Ubuntu 14.04, firstly install the package:

sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree

2. Then, run the following command to install it:

sudo update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --install

The installer can be used to install Pepper Flash Player from either Google Chrome Stable, Beta or Unstable.

For instance, to install Pepper Flash Player from Google Chrome Beta, use:

sudo update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --install --beta --unverified

Or, to install Pepper Flash Player from Google Chrome Unstable, use:

sudo update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --install --unstable --unverified

If you want to uninstall it, use the command below:

sudo update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree --uninstall

That's it.

I don't know if this installer will be ported for older Ubuntu versions but if you use an older Ubuntu version, you can already use a PPA that does pretty much the same thing. For more information about this PPA and how to install Pepper Flash Player for Chromium on older Ubuntu versions, see: Install Pepper Flash Player For Chromium In Ubuntu Via PPA.

Also see: Enable Hardware Acceleration In Chrome / Chromium Browser

Thanks to towpik for the tip!

How To Install Chromium Beta Or Dev Channel In Ubuntu Via PPA

Quick tip for Chromium Browser users: The official Ubuntu Chromium Browser beta and dev channel PPAs are unmaintained for a long time but there are a couple of PPAs you can use to get the latest beta and development Chromium builds in Ubuntu.

Saikrishna Arcot maintains two Chromium PPAs: one for the Chromium Beta channel and one for the Chromium Dev channel builds - both PPAs are updated regularly for all supported Ubuntu versions.

However, there is a downside to using these PPAs: these Chromium builds don't include the Google APIs which means that some features like the browser Sync don't work by default. To get these features back, you need to get a Google API key - the instructions for doing this are included in the PPAs description.

You can use these Chromium builds without the Google API but remember that the Sync, among others, won't work!

Another thing you should note is that using these PPAs, your current Chromium installation will be overwritten by the one in the PPA, so you can't install both Chromium Stable and Chromium Beta or Dev in the same time.

Install Chromium Beta Channel build in Ubuntu

To add the Chromium Beta Channel PPA and install the browser in Ubuntu (and derivatives, like Linux Mint, etc.), use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-beta
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Install Chromium Development Channel build in Ubuntu

To add the Chromium Dev Channel PPA and install the browser in Ubuntu (and derivatives, like Linux Mint, etc.), use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-dev
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

The Aura UI was disabled for the latest Chromium development builds but it used to be enabled until yesterday and that caused some rendering bugs. The Aura UI will return in Chromium dev builds and it might get pretty unstable when that happens so use this with care!

How to revert the changes and return to Chromium stable

You can use PPA Purge to purge the two PPAs above and return to the Chromium stable version from the official Ubuntu repositories. To do this, firstly install ppa-purge:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

Then:

- if you've added the Chromium Beta Channel PPA, purge it using the following command:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-beta

- if you've added the Chromium Dev Channel PPA, purge it using the command below:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-dev

Enable Hardware Acceleration In Chrome / Chromium Browser [Quick Tip]

Many of you probably already know about this but for the rest, here's a quick tip that you might find useful.

Quick tip: If you use Chrome or Chromium browsers and hardware acceleration is disabled for your graphics card, you can try to force it to get better video playback performance (for instance on YouTube) as well as support for features such as the 3D Earth view in the new Google Maps.

To check if your Chrome / Chromium browser uses hardware acceleration, open a new tab, type: "chrome://gpu" (without the quotes) and look under "Graphics Feature status" - all (or at least most of) the features should say "hardware accelerated".

Here's how it looks like on my laptop (Intel graphics) after enabling hardware acceleration:

And here's another screenshot with this page before enabling hardware acceleration:

To force Chrome / Chromium to use hardware acceleration, open a new tab, type "chrome://flags" (without quotes), search for "Override software rendering list", enable it and restart Chrome / Chromium:

Try it out:

you should now be able to access the 3D Earth Google Maps feature (look for an "Earth" icon in the Google Maps Preview lower right corner);
try some 1080p full-screen YouTube HTML5 or Flash videos with and without hardware acceleration in Chrome - in my test using Intel graphics under Ubuntu, a full-screen YouTube video used twice as much CPU without hardware acceleration than when enabling hardware acceleration in Chrome;
try a Chrome experiment, with and without hardware acceleration. For me, THIS experiment didn't work in Chrome (it said "Please wait while I load the model..." but the model didn't load) until I forced hardware acceleration.

If you experience issues after this change, simply revert it: open "chrome://flags" (without quotes) in Chrome and disable it.

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