Upgrading from Chromium 33 to 37

The other day I upgraded from Chromium version 33 to 37. Needless to say I broke a few things.

The flashplayer was screwed up, so I had to try to fix that. After trying some suggestions on symlinking things from /opt/chrome in and failing, then pulling down the latest stable release and manually copying out the flash player plugin and trying to use that. I did some more research and crawling of mailing lists and found a solution that worked.

Here are the instructions I used to install the ppa for chromium's pepper flash plugin. From yout terminal do the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:skunk/pepper-flash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pepflashplugin-installer

The instructions then tell you to edit the /etc/chromium-browser/default profile and add in the following line to the script:

. /usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/pepflashplayer.sh

That dot is important and supposed to be there btw. This fixed my problem until I restarted my computer. Then I had to add the line back in. At first I thought to myself, well I'll just put an echo into my .bash_profile and that will be that. But, since the file is owned by root it's not so simple. So I took a look at the profile itself. Upon investigation I found that in the profile it states this:

 This file is sourced by /bin/sh from 2 # /usr/bin/chromium-browser

So, I hopped over to /usr/bin/chromium-browser and checked out the script. Around line 76 I found a call to source the file. After investigating the script a bit I decided to add the following to my bash profile:

#fix chromium flash player 
export FLASH_VERSION=15.0.0.152
export CHROMIUM_FLAGS="${CHROMIUM_FLAGS} --ppapi-flash-path=/usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flash-version=$FLASH_VERSION"

But this is not the only way to fix it! On line 81 of the bin script it reads all the profiles in the customizations directory. So we could simply add the call to the pepflashplayer script in a custom profile.

So this is /etc/chromium-browser/customizations/flash:

. /usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/pepflashplayer.sh

And then fix it up by running the following:

$sudo chmod --reference=/etc/chromium-browser/default /etc/chromium-browser/customizations/flash 
$ sudo chown --reference=/etc/chromium-browser/default /etc/chromium-browser/customizations/flash 

At that point you are no longer screwing with global exported flags and instead can use your custom profile instead. Neat right?