Installing Flash for Opera

The instructions for installing flash on Opera seems to be a little bit lacking, given that the flash installer script seems to think that Firefox is the only browser that I have and refuses to offer me an alternative installation path.

The way to get around that is to manually copy libflashplayer.so into the /plugins subdirectory under Opera's root directory. ( Thanks to the guy in #opera@freenode who told me to look under Tools |Preferences | Advanced tab | Content | plug-in options | to find out where to stick libflashplayer.so )

It's not too difficult to install the flash plugin, just download it, untar the archive, copy libflashplayer.so into the subdirectory and you're done!

While Flash works, it does not seem like it's working completely yet. On my console, I've noticed a couple of error messages like the ones below, which seems to suggest that the plugin isn't working as intended:

(process:27461): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: gtype.c:2254: initialization assertion failed, use IA__g_type_init() prior to this function

(process:27461): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_clipboard_get_for_display: assertion `GDK_IS_DISPLAY (display)' failed
Adobe FlashPlayer: gtk_clipboard_get(GDK_SELECTION_PRIMARY); failed. Trying to call gtk_init(0,0);
opera: Plug-in 27461 is not responding. It will be closed.
opera: Define environment variable OPERA_KEEP_BLOCKED_PLUGIN to keep blocked plug-ins.

On sites like YouTube and Yahoo Finance, Flash seems to work properly, even with the error messages shown, but on kongregate.com, most of the Flash game widgets will not load, where the only output is only a grey box, indicating that the plugin isn't running.

('top' showing ~90% CPU utilization for Opera)

Other times, visiting sites with flash content on Opera will cause a 90% CPU utilization, the culprit being 'operapluginwrap'. This seems to affect other plugins as well.

Opera 9.50 is still an Alpha version, so I'll give it a benefit of a doubt. Hopefully these issues can be resolved in the Beta stage, and definitely I won't want to see this in a 'release-candidate'. Hope that the issue will be fixed soon!