Friday 11 March 2016

Slimjet Browser 64 bit in ElementaryOS / Ubuntu Couldn't Load Plugin - fixed

Friday 11th March 2016 and after updating my ElementaryOS Freya from 32 bit to 64 bit and going through all my Brother scanner problems and finally getting both Skype and the 64 bit version of Viber working, I had another glitch.  Googling the problem shows that it is pretty common but none of the suggestions worked.

I use Flashpeak Slimjet for most of my browsing.  It is based on Chromium and as well as being fast, it has some handy built in features.  Because I now had the 64 bit version of Elementary I installed the 64 bit deb package.  And it worked nicely until I wanted to play a video.  That's when I go the message that it 'couldn't load the plugin'.  So I did the usual chrome thing and installed the latest Flash (Adobe Flash Player Version: 21.0.0.182  at the moment) made sure it was enabled and restarted Slimjet.  When that failed I tried googling and tried the various suggestions.

Nothing worked.  I rebooted the computer and restarted Slimjet - and nothing worked again.  And it seems from discussions on forums and blogs that it is a bit of a lottery.  Some suggestions work for some people and not for others.

So I went back into Slimjet and entered  about:plugins in the address bar again and re-enabled the native PPAPI player plugin, which I think is called something like pepper-flash.  Then I checked the old Adobe Flash player v11.x was actually gone and I only had the 21.x version and made sure it is enabled.

And I downloaded the 32bit deb package.  Opened it using Software Centre and told it to install anyway when it told me it was not a good idea.  I had to do that twice to get the install to complete.  It removed some files, but they all seemed specific to Slimjet or Chromium.  I suppose I will find out if they affect anything else in the next few days.

But the good news is, I now have a 32 bit Slimjet running on 64 bit Ubuntu based OS (Elementary OS Freya) and I can play all my Youtube stuff again.   And the download tool still works nicely.

The neat thing about the download tool is that when I make a video in say OpenShot, I can upload a big mp4 to YouTube, and Youtube makes it into several smaller sized options at different resolutions.  Slimjet lets me open one of my videos in Youtube and choose what size file to download.  Great for emailing or uploading somewhere else.

So if all else fails, and you are sick of downloading and messing with things and getting nowhere, and if you already used Synaptic to install the latest Adobe Flash Player plugin.
Don't uninstall the 64 bit Slimjet.  Download the 32 bit, then open it using Software Centre and let is sort out the changes.

It just might work!  (and of course - it might not)

U P D A T E  - The Next Morning

Ok, I found the first problem.  Logging in this morning, there was no Network Manager icon in the Plank (Elementary's name for Panel).  I connected to my network using the menu.

Applications (Elementary's name for the start menu) >  System Settings > Network

From there I just selected my network and turned the toggle at the top right ON and it connected.  
Then in a terminal:

sudo apt-get indicator-applet

That put my Network indicator back.

Other than that so far all is well and Slimjet 32 bit on Elementary OS Freya 64 bit is still happily playing Youtube Videos.

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