Comment 20 for bug 173890

Mr. Cyrus Jones, thank you. i've been trying to figure this stuff out for a couple days after having to reinstall ubuntu because something's been messed up with my mouse (cursor would momemtarily freeze when i hit a key on the keyboard)
anyway
i had the same problem as the above posts
for the people above me, it's a good idea to read the comments spit out by the commands you type into the terminal
in this case, the very last line solves the puzzle
"dpkg-buildpackage: (Use -d flag to override.)"
so, Cyrus' last command will now be modified to become "dpkg-buildpackage -b -rfakeroot -d"
i was also having problems with the -rfakeroot, so i simply took that out and used sudo
so my final command was "sudo dpkg-buildpackage -b -d"

i hit one more bump, something wasn't installed (sorry, i closed that terminal window so i can't copy and paste the problem)
the solution to this one final problem was to download cdbs, found here http://packages.debian.org/sarge/cdbs

download that, run the command "sudo dpkg-buildpackage -b -d" and you should hopefully finally have flash installed