TweetDeck in 64-Bit Linux

I updated my home computer the other day, installing the latest 64-bit version of Linux Mint. This is my first foray into regularly using a 64-bit version of Linux, so I was not really prepared for some of the issues I experienced. Most of my issues (Amarok not working properly) were easily solved by simply adding some of the default Ubuntu repositories that are disabled by default in Mint.

However, I still had problems getting Adobe AIR and TweetDeck (or Seesmic Desktop, for that matter) to work correctly. After a bit of searching, I found that this is because Adobe hasn’t released a 64-bit version of Adobe AIR, and 64-bit Linux isn’t really prepared, out-of-the-box, to handle the 32-bit version.

I found an article in the Adobe knowledgebase explaining how to get Adobe AIR installed. Unfortunately, the link to the getlibs package in that article is outdated, and it was really difficult to find the real location of that file. I finally found it. This is, apparently, only a termporary location for the package, so I don’t know where it will end up afterwards. There is a topic in the Ubuntu forums where the location is discussed.

Removing Adobe AIR

If you are anything like me, it’s possible that you found a way to install Adobe AIR, but then found that TweetDeck or some other AIR application wouldn’t work properly. To get a clean slate, I ran the following commands:

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep "adobe"
$ sudo dpkg -r adobe-certs adobeair1.0

The second command should change based on the results of the grep command you run in the first command.

Installing Adobe AIR

The first set of steps is documented on Adobe’s Web site, which also includes instructions for installing AIR on non-Debian Linux systems.

  1. To begin with, download the latest Adobe AIR package.
  2. Then, you need to download the getlibs-all.deb package linked above.
  3. Install the getlibs-all.deb package using the Debian installer. If you download it with Firefox, you will probably be asked if you want to open the package – you can go ahead and do so. If not, you should be able to just double-click on the package when it finishes downloading.
  4. You then need to run the following commands, which will attempt to install some of the missing 32-bit libraries. In my case, these libraries appear to have been installed, already, as they all said there were no additional packages to install.
    • $ sudo getlibs ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
      $ sudo getlibs -l libgnome-keyring.so
      $ sudo getlibs -l libgnome-keyring.so.0
      $ sudo getlibs -l libgnome-keyring.so.0.1.1
  5. When you are done with that, you may need to install libnss and libnspr, which can be downloaded from the following locations:
  6. Next, you need to extract the libs from the deb packages using fileroller, and copy the lib files into your /usr/lib32 directory. To do so, run the following command for each (using the appropriate .deb filename):
    • $ sudo file-roller ./libnss3-1d_3.12.0~beta3-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
    • Then, navigate to ./ -> usr -> lib (./usr/lib) and extract all of the files in that directory (in each archive) into /usr/lib32 on your system.
  7. Next, you need to run the following command to install a few other 32-bit libraries:
    • $ sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libnss3.so.1d /usr/lib32/libnss3.so
      $ sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libssl3.so.1d /usr/lib32/libssl3.so
      $ sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libnspr4.so.0d /usr/lib32/libnspr4.so
  8. Now, install Adobe AIR by either double-clicking on the Adobe AIR package you downloaded or by running the following command:
    • $ ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
    • Make sure you use the appropriate location of the installer
  9. Finally, run the following command to copy one more file to the appropriate place to get Adobe AIR running properly:
    • $ sudo cp /usr/lib/libadobecertstore.so /usr/lib32
  10. If you are running Ubuntu 9.04 (or Mint 7), you will also need to run the following command:
    • $ sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns

Installing TweetDeck

Once you have Adobe AIR successfully installed, you are ready to prepare your system for TweetDeck. These instructions were initially found in the Simon Online blog. All you need to do now is run each of the four following commands (one at a time):

wget http://ubuntu.interlegis.gov.br/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gnome-keyring/libgnome-keyring0_2.22.2-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
ar x libgnome-keyring0_2.22.2-0ubuntu1_i386.deb data.tar.gz
tar -xzvf data.tar.gz
cp usr/lib/* /usr/lib32/

Then, you can install TweetDeck. To do that, you will most likely need to manually download the latest version from TweetDeck’s Web site, as their auto-installer tends not to work on Linux. To do that, you should be able to right-click on the version number on TweetDeck’s Web site (right now, it says “0.26”) and choose to save the link to your computer. Then, simply double-click on the package and TweetDeck should install.

5 Responses

  • Holden Page

    Convenient timing because I need to do this for my friend today :)

    • I hope it works for you. Like I said, a lot of the tutorials online all had the same instructions, but none of them actually got TweetDeck working properly until I found that last one.

  • Is STep 7 a typo? That doesn’t make sense.

    Having trouble getting through all this, I suspect that the problem lies in step 7.

    • I have corrected the issue. There was an error on step 7. There should have been line-breaks at each of the dollar signs ($), but the three separate commands were showing up on a single line within the post for some reason. Please try again. The three commands shown in step 7 should be executed separately (without the dollar signs – those are just present to indicate a new command has started on the command line).

  • Tom

    I like tweetdeck, but not that much! Well done for getting to the bottom of the problem, though.