How to get Pipelight to current Flash version?

[Silent Observer]

Okay, I got the nouveau/nVidia conflict fixed on my own. I'm going to mark the thread solved, as I'm now certain that I had and have the correct OGL libraries enabled in the nVidia drivers, and the problems I'm having with Pipelight/Flash and Path of Exile aren't resolvable with driver changes or related to the flash version (though I'd like it if Pipelight either provided a method to update the Flash Player it uses, or updated their package fairly promptly when a new Flash is released and the old one expires -- the latter as is done with update-sun-jre and flashplayer-plugin-nonfree for security updates). I'll get Path of Exile working by tweaking with PlayOnLinux, and I'll just have to wait for Pipelight to fix the 64-bit Flash operation (which mostly works now, but is prone to crashing and pretty slow).

For reference, if you change from an nVidia proprietary driver to nouveau, you may be unable to easily change back; though the nVidia driver will install and build correctly, nouveau sticks to the kernel and takes precedence during system startup. The solution appears to be to blacklist nouveau -- which I did by creating file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau containing blacklist nouveau, though I've seen online references with a longer list of files -- and then reboot and run update-initramfs and reboot again. I'm not certain the initrd update is required, but doing it helped me find an error (leading spaces before each line in the blacklist file) which may have cause the blacklist command to malfunction, and it rebuilt the startup so nouveau doesn't get a chance to horn in.

[SteveRiley]

You found the correct solution -- blacklisting Nouveau and updating the initramfs. However, I'm surpised this wasn't happening automatically. Here, the nVidia installer creates the necessary blacklist file:

steve@t520:~$ [B]cat /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf [/B]
# This file was installed by nvidia-340
# Do not edit this file manually

blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
blacklist nvidia-173
blacklist nvidia-96
blacklist nvidia-current-updates
blacklist nvidia-173-updates
blacklist nvidia-96-updates
blacklist nvidia-340-updates
alias nvidia nvidia_340
alias nvidia-uvm nvidia_340-uvm
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off

[MoonRise]

Can confirm the same here:

moonrise@Panther:~$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf
# This file was installed by nvidia-331-updates
# Do not edit this file manually

blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
blacklist nvidia-173
blacklist nvidia-96
blacklist nvidia-current-updates
blacklist nvidia-173-updates
blacklist nvidia-96-updates
blacklist nvidia-331
alias nvidia nvidia_331_updates
alias nvidia-uvm nvidia_331_updates-uvm
alias nouveau off

[Silent Observer]

I'm sure blacklisting nouveau did occur automatically when I initially installed 331 just after installation, but I suspect that when I selected nouveau in the Driver Manager, something that must have been done to remove the blacklist of nouveau didn't get undone, possibly due to having manually installed 340.

Aside from a tendency to crash, I'm finding the x64-flash plugin as supplied by Pipelight is working pretty well. Unfortunately, the Unity3D seems to completely fail to install the plugin (either 32-bit or 64-bit); I get nothing when trying to view Unity3D game content, and both Firefox and SeaMonkey report a Unity3D error in their add-on managers. I don't really understand why there's are video problems using the 32-bit plugin, though; I used a 32-bit Windows version of Firefox under Wine in Mepis, and it worked pretty well until I tried to update its Flash and get Windows Java to install -- and I've played many-many hours of Path of Exile and There (32-bit applications) under Wine/PlayOnLinux in Mepis 64-bit, without any video problems.

[Silent Observer]

Just to follow up on this: after much reinstalling of applications via PlayOnLinux, I've gotten everything I needed installed and running, except the 32-bit Flash plugin for Pipelight, and the x64-flash there works most of the time (crashes almost as often as the Linux-native Flash 11.2, but displays correctly when it runs at all). I'm going to call this solved; I still don't have Flash 14, but I presume future updates of Pipelight will install that version (perhaps just after Flash 15 is released) or make it possible for the Flash plugin to be updated through the usual Flash update procedures.