After seeing it in action I wanted to give TweetDeck a try so, optimist that I am, I tried their installer. It didn't work, complaining about a corrupt .air file. So I figured I'd install the AIR framework first and then see where that would get me. All the way to this error message :
Adobe AIR could not be installed because this is not a supported Linux distribution. Only RPM- and Debian-based Linux distributions are supported.
Gentoo? Source-based distros? Get lost! Fortunately, flashman already ran into the problem and figured out a way to get AIR applications running on his distro and documented it.
One more problem : I don't use Gnome. I don't use KDE. I'm an Awesome fan. AIR doesn't like it when people don't use Gnome or KDE on linux. It requires gnome-keyring or KWallet and it gets confused rather easily. According to the Adobe troubleshooting page, you can set it straight by exporting a variable.
For gnome-keyring:
$ export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=1
For KWallet:
$ export KDE_FULL_SESSION=1
If you've got a KDE4 based KWallet, you also want to do:
$ export KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4
Ka-boom! TweetDeck on Awesome on Gentoo. And I can start it with Winkey-F10 as well, like so :
awful.key({ modkey }, "F10",
function ()
awful.util.spawn_with_shell("export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=1;
/opt/air-sdk/bin/adl -nodebug \
/opt/air-apps/TweetDeck/META-INF/AIR/application.xml \
/opt/air-apps/TweetDeck")
end),
Palm finally released their WebOS SDK to the public (to be found on http://developer.palm.com ). Here's what I did to get things up and running on my Gentoo laptop:
- Download the .deb file
- Convert the .deb file to a tarball ( deb2targz )
- Extract the thing to /
- Try `palm-emulator` and swear some because "Palm Emulator requires that VirtualBox 2.2.0 or greater is installed." 2.2.4 > 2.2.0, right?
- Some decompiling of the jar files reveals that on Linux, the virtualbox classes simply search for /usr/bin/VBoxManage. If it's installed somewhere else, tough luck, you don't have virtualbox. A symlink fixes this.
Note: on Windows, `reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Sun\xVM VirtualBox /v InstallDir` is used to determine the installation directory. On my Vista x64 box I can execute this query in a DOS prompt and get the correct result, even though the emulator complains.
- Ignore the novacom warning for now and presto, one booting WebOS VBox machine.
The novacom warning :
In order to install or debug applications in the Palm Emulator, the novacom
service must be running on your desktop.
Please verify that you have the latest Palm SDK installed correctly.
`sudo /opt/Palm/novacom/novacomd` fixes this. There's a /etc/event.d/palm-novacomd script which makes the novacom service start on rulevels 2, 3, 4 and 5. This is probably a very debian-ish way to do things, but won't quite work for me ;-)
Anyway, I have a running virtual machine and I should be able to install and debug applications from Eclipse. I'm happy. For now :-)
After running into this on three computers, I figured I'd mention it here as well. It's a rather old issue by now, but at a certain point com_err and ss were moved to e2fsprogs on Gentoo. I found my workaround here : www.odi.ch/weblog/posting.php
Make sure not to unmerge com_err and ss before doing emerge -fuD world first!
Also, I had my "emerge" aliased to "sudo emerge". That won't work, because sudo also relies on com_err, which is unmerged at a certain point. Make sure you're logged in as root for this procedure.
