I was experiencing some annoying crashes of Firefox while viewing Youtube videos, or any other streaming flash-based video sites. I could watch video for a while, but if I hit the back button, or chose another video to watch, the browser would just lock up hard. Looking on the Ubuntu Forums came up with a few possible causes and solutions, but none really worked for me. Until I saw this post, where someone suggested that the onboard sound on the motherboard could be at fault. They disabled the onboard sound in BIOS, and the crashing went away. Re-enabling sound in BIOS caused the crashes to come back.

This person used the same sound chip that is in my Abit AB9 motherboard, the Realtek ALC-888. It looks like Adobe is having issues with Realtek chips. I tried disabling onboard sound on my system, and the crashes stopped for me as well. Fortunately I still had another sound card that I plugged into a free PCI slot - an old Aureal Vortex 2 - based card made by Videologic. Ubuntu booted up, detected the card and the thing worked straight away! Bloody impressive, if you ask me. Here was a card that I bought about a week before Aureal was swallowed up by Creative, meaning the last fully working driver set was for Windows 98. The card was only partly usable in Windows 2000 and XP, and yet Linux has given the thing a new life. I’m happy.

The only downside to this fix is that you will have to shell out for an external sound card if you don’t have one lying around. Maybe in the future Adobe will come out with a fix that lets the Realtek audio work, but until then this is the best fix, or rather, workaround, available.