UPDATE 2009-10-01: I’ve just gotten Air running on my Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) install. Apparently Adobe updated their installation instructions to include all the required steps now. Good for them! So, this post isn’t really useful anymore, but I’ll keep it around anyway, just in case.

There I was, running 64-bit Ubunutu and trying to get Adobe AIR to install. The problem is, AIR is written for 32-bit systems, so it needs some extra help installing on 64-bit Ubuntu. I managed to get it running, with a little help from Adobe’s site and grabbing getlibs here (their link was broken), everything looked good. That was, until I tried to install an AIR application.

Specifically, I was trying to get TweetDeck running. The application would launch, but none of the buttons would do anything. I also tried running AlertyThingy, which would open and allow me to start using it, but wouldn’t actually let me add any channels. I was pretty frustrated.

Then I got the idea to run it from the terminal and see if the application was spitting out any errors. It was!

$ /opt/TweetDeck/bin/TweetDeck
libgnome-keyring.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

OK, so apparently I needed to install the 32-bit version of the libgnome-keyring libs. Of course, I wasn’t sure how to do this; enter Google. Apparently I wasn’t the only one trying to get Tweetdeck running on a 64-bit Ubuntu system. I found the instructions on this blog, down near the bottom.

As I already have GetLibs installed I thought this should be fairly easy to fix by grabbing the missing 32bit libs

sudo getlibs -l libgnome-keyring.so

Still no luck - TweetDeck seems to be looking for libgnome-keyring.so.0

Ok then:-

sudo getlibs -l libgnome-keyring.so.0

still no work so I look in the lib32 folder and see that libgnome-keyring.so.0 is a broken simlink linking to the non-existant libgnome-keyring.so.0.1.1 so I try

sudo getlibs -l libgnome-keyring.so.0.1.1

and hey presto simlink is fixed. On running my shell script to start the SDK TweetDeck workaround it pops up asking for Twitter logon details and in I go, perfect.

Exactly the way it worked for me as well. So, now I’m using TweetDeck, and I have to say, the application is pretty awesome! And of course, if you’re on Twitter, hit me up some time ;).