Ubuntu 64-bit and Adobe Air

UPDATE 2009-10-01: I’ve just gotten Adobe 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!

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!

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$ /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 presto, the 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.