Club Linux Coffs Harbour

There's a bug in the non-free Flash plugin for Firefox (in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, aka "Dapper Drake"), which means you get no sound from the plugin. The bug was deliberately introduced because the brain-damaged way that the plugin communicated with the audio system made Firefox less stable.

There's a workaround to restore audio to the Flash plugin which, if proponents are to be believed,  does not have any negative consequenses. I've tried it and can testify that it works, for the moment at least.  Here's an abstract description of the workaround, and here's the step-by-step instructions for those that need them.

As everybody knows, I don't normally encourage the use of non-free software, but sometimes you need to access vital information in proprietary formats. 

Update: After a few days, I can say with some certainty that the above workaround is a bad idea. I've found that Firefox hangs after using the Flash plugin, and has a tendency to leave orphan processes (presumably the plugin itself) hanging around eating up system resources after you force it to quit.