Hey just got TweetDeck running on my Fedora 10 Laptop. It took me about 20 minutes to figure this out, I just had some permission issues (error 5100). Go get the latest Adobe Air from the official Adobe Air website and save it somewhere. Then you’ll have to chmod +x the .bin file to be able to execute it. Run it using your root account – that should install Adobe Air and some utilities for Air application management, just like Windows would (I guess).
Then, download the latest TweetDeck Air application for Linux. Now here’s where I got the permissions issues. You have to run the TweetDeck installation as root, otherwise you will not be able to write to the /opt directory – that’s standard for Air applications, though I wasn’t able to write to /home/myuser either, although I had full rights to access that, so I guess the right place is actually /opt. Open your terminal, logon to root and try the following:
/usr/bin/Adobe AIR Application Installer
That should launch the Adobe AIR app installer. Pick the TweetDeck .air file and attempt to install it. Worked for me. You can create the shortcut icons, but you shouldn’t launch TweetDeck after installation, cause you wouldn’t wanna run it as root, right? After the setup’s finished check out your Applications – Accessories menu, you should see TweetDeck.
Hope that helped. Used to TwitterFox but I guess TwitterDeck will do just great. Don’t forget to choose the right tweets update configuration (I got it working at about 80%). Don’t overload the API and don’t forget to switch off any other Twitter clients you use before launching TwitterDeck.
Updating TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop on Fedora
I’ve stopped using TweetDeck for a while due to a couple of reasons. I got my Twitter developer account which gives me 20,000 API calls per hour (unlike the ordinary accounts with 100), and the new TweetDeck doesn’t work with that amount (I’ve no idea why), so I had to switch to Seesmic Desktop which is also based on Adobe AIR, thus cross-platform and I managed to install it on my Fedora 10 machine using the above method.
Updating TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop (and all other Adobe AIR applications) is quite straightforward in Windows and Mac, but I came up with the same permissions issues in Linux. It seems that we’re not allowed to use the auto-update feature (the popup-box that shows up when you run TweetDeck and asks you to automatically update the software). So we’ll probably have to go the other way round. Go to TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop official website and download the latest .AIR distro, save it somewhere, and as root run the AIR Application Installer program:
/usr/bin/Adobe AIR Application Installer
Select your .AIR file and update. After the update it automatically runs the new version of TweetDeck (or Seesmic Desktop). Close that. It’s being run under root, while your profile is on your regular user. Just start as a regular user and everything should be fine. Worked for me ;)
Good luck!
Updated June 20th 2009
TweetDeck is great but can be a little confusing at first. You can also get Twhirl through a similar process, you could try that to and compare them. Nice looking blog by the way!
Christine, thank you! Yeah, I will check out Twhirl and give you some feedback on the pros and cons of both in comparison. By the way, I wonder how TweetDeck would look on an iPhone.. Must be awesome! :)
This worked perfectly for me — love Tweetdeck and have really despaired not being able to figure out why I kept getting the permission errors. Thanks for your post!
Hey Sherry, you're welcome. Glad you liked it!
Nice, used it to install some apps, I also use the SDK to run some others.
Instead of having to login as root, just use Sudo to run the installer:
$ sudo /usr/bin/Adobe AIR Application Installer
Thanks again.
Good point! Thanks. And thanks for connecting on Google Friend Connect! Good job on your blog.
Thanks for the post. This helped me figure out (or remember, really) that there was a permission issue. My Air installer is in my /opt folder so I ran this command to get mine going as root.
# /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/airappinstaller
Thanks again, I'm running TweetDeck just fine (www.twitter.com/FergatROn).
Glad to have helped.
Thanks for your great post, I install Seesemic Desktop Adobe Air Twitter client successfully.
You're welcome Charles, glad it worked for you.
I can not install on Fedora 11, there were changes? During the installation of Adobe Air is something strange, that I do not have permission to install, even running the program as root.
Cheers.
J~
Hey Jayme.
I really am not sure about F11, I haven't tried that yet. I downloaded the ISO, but didn't manage to upgrade from F10 so smoothly, then decided to leave it until next time.
The permission issues were on F10 too though, you should check out Adobe's website and read the Adobe AIR installation guide (the Linux version).
Good luck!
[…] this page was mentioned by Fernando F.Oliveira (@ffoliveira), Valent Turkovic (@valentt), Marc Ferguson (@fergatron), kovshenin (@kovshenin), kovshenin (@kovshenin) and others. […]