Fedora 14 64 bit : Distorted Sounds From Flash Player "SQUARE"

If you have been using the new 64 bit beta of Flash Player ("Square") on Fedora 14, you might have noticed that some audio streams are distorted by a weird metallic noise that seems to emanate from the background. Apparently this is caused by a patch to glibc - which removes support for overlapping regions in memcpy. Although this is the right thing to do and clearly Adobe is using memcpy in a non-standard way, it's an annoying bug for non-techie users who don't really care much about whether an application is doing the "right thing" under the hood. 

There are several solutions for the problem at the moment:

• Use Linus Torvalds' custom memcpy function
• Use Ray Strode's flashplayer patch which replaces all memcpy calls with memmove
• Use the 32bit Flash plugin

I have tried the first two and they both work perfectly.

For those interested, the full Bugzilla thread can be found at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477

Adobe Flash 'Square' for Linux 64bit

After putting 64bit native Linux Flash player on hold indefinitely, Adobe have done an about turn and released a version of Flash Player 10.2 'Square' preview for 64 bit Linux as well. Good things about this release are that:

• After some serious security flaws were discovered, Adobe advised on an upgrade. But for us poor 64bit Linux users, there was no 64 bit version to upgrade to until now.
• It's a native Linux 64bit binary which should integrate well with Pulseaudio etc and use less reources. This funny comment on Slashdot illustrates the previous state of things really well.
• I suddenly seem to be able to watch 1080p HD videos on Youtube. Can't recall ever seeing that option while I was using the old player.

So go ahead and grab the new version from here. To install the plugin in Fedora, just untar and copy libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins