Community Matters

I’ve been fighting to get TweetDeck to work on my Linux system for a while. There simply is no comparable native client under Linux. I’ve used Gwibber which is ok, but no comparison to TweetDeck.

There are a couple of problems to solve: first, you need to get Adobe Air to work. And with all due respect to Adobe – they clearly haven’t figured out the kinks to making their software actually install easily on the various Linux distributions. A quick Google search seems to make that painfully clear.

Forget 64bit Linux. Yes, allegedly it works for a few people with various 32bit libraries installed, but after six weeks of trying to get this to work I came to the conclusion that this was a lost cause.

And even with 32bit Fedora-11 there still are a number of problems to solve. First you need to make sure that you have all the dependencies installed – even though it would be easy to have rpm do that for you, Adobe clearly hasn’t figured out how to do that… so you have to do this manually:

sudo yum -y install gnome-keyring rpm-build nss

Then (thanks to erik jacobs) you appear to need to manually create another link for librpmbuild:

sudo ln -s librpmbuild.so.0.0.0 /usr/lib/librpmbuild-4.7.so

Now you are ready to run the installer:

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
sudo AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

But this still doesn’t solve the problem of installing AIR applications. Adobe wants to install them into /opt by default (which a regular user can’t write to) – and even after changing that to do writeable by my user things still failed with cryptic (and useless) error messages. So I finally figured out that I needed to manually download the AIR installer packages (like TweetDeck_x_yz.air) and then run the AIR application installer from hand (again as root):

sudo Adobe\ AIR\ Application\ Installer

and then pick the .air file in the file select box; the installer is too dumb to allow you to pass a .air file on the command line. Come on guys…

With all these steps I got it to work – but frankly I think this is an embarrassing sign for how much further AIR has to go to be really useful on Linux. 2 out of 10 points, Adobe…