Mouse Clicks on Flash Objects Not Working in 64-bit Linux? You Might Need to Disable Compiz

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
at 9:01pm


Ever since I installed Ubuntu on my computer, I have had issues with Flash objects. Half of the time, I was unable to click on certain parts of Flash objects, like the video controls in some YouTube videos, for example. For the longest time, I thought that the problem was due to the fact that the 64-bit Adobe Flash plugin is in it’s alpha stages, but recently I discovered the real culprit.
It turns out, Compiz interferes with how the system gets information from my mouse, causing the failed clicks. Simple solution is to turn off Compiz, and the problem disappears.

For me, this came with a new problem. Gnome Do‘s Docky requires compositing in order to work, so without Compiz enabled, I was left without a dock (and I like my dock). As uninformed as I was, I didn’t know that Gnome’s own Metacity had a compositing manager bundled with it, so I enabled that and I saw my dock once more. Just to be safe, I tested that Flash objects still worked. They did.

So, how can you go about disabling Compiz and enabling Metacity’s compositing manager? Read on.

  1. Click on System->Preferences->Appearance and then navigate to the Visual Effects tab.
  2. Select ‘None’ and close the window.
  3. Open up a terminal window and run the command:
    4. gconf-editor
  4. In the left tree pane, navigate to apps->metacity->general and find compositing_manager in the list on the right.
  5. Enable the compositing_manager option and close the window.
  6. Restart the X Server or just log off and log back for changes to take effect.
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5 Comments

Andrew DeFaria

December 11th, 2009
at 2:29pm

I had hoped that this would have solved my problem but alas it doesn’t. You like your dock – I like my compiz effects. Does the metacity compositing thing do what compiz does?

In any event I turned off compiz and check to see if the problem was solved. It was not. I will can’t click on various elements (well I can’t but they fail to work for many clicks but then suddenly one of the clicks finally works. Very frustrating). So it seems to me that turning off compiz does *not* solve the problem for me.

Does just turning off compiz solve the problem for you?

Also, for grins I turned on Metacity’s compositing manager. Can it run with compiz? I don’t know, I haven’t tried logging out and back in yet.

Eddie

December 11th, 2009
at 2:49pm

You won’t get the same effects with Metacity’s compositing manager as you would with Compiz (the plugins). Yes, turning off compiz fixed it for me. You need to set metacity as the default window manager as well, but it won’t be until you log off/log back in that you will see any changes.

PasQty

June 19th, 2010
at 7:01pm

actually its not the same as compiz…

Daniel Luci

September 2nd, 2010
at 4:09pm

Well, turning off all tthe colol ubuntu effects did get the functionality on youtube and other flash-objects back
But im also quite in love with my beautiful Cairo Dock and smooth wobbly windows… Would be nice if there would be a good way to just fix the actual problems instead of taking shorcuts that chops one off in the other end…
Hmm, still im happy to have found your solution so i dont have to go crazy with flash not working properly ;)
Thankx!!!

Daniel Luci

September 2nd, 2010
at 4:22pm

This seemes to work for everybody trying it (and just did for me too *happy*)

* Hit ALT+F2 and enter
* gksudo gedit /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer
* add the following line BEFORE the last line of text
* export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
* Save.
* Restart any applications using flash

Good luck!

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