Friday, March 20, 2009

Adobe AIR, Tweetdeck and Twhirl on Linux

Google Fodder: If you want to run some of the latest, best and coolest Twitter clients, then you want to install Adobe AIR on your Linux system. AIR is Adobe's cross-platform application environment and in v1.5.1 it seems to work very well.

On top of AIR, you can install and run both Tweetdeck and Twhirl. Each has their advantages and I'm not going to address them in detail here. I just want you to know you can get them, you can install them easily (just allow Adobe AIR Installer to open the download, rather than save the file) and you can run them on Linux - 32-bit or 64-bit. 

The one caveat I have found so far is that running an AIR app (Tweetdeck or Twhirl) on 64-bit Ubuntu, will cause the Adobe Flash player for 64-bit Linux to crash. The Flash player is only available for 64-bit linux as an alpha version, so bugs are to be expected. YouTube mostly works OK for a while, but if you go to a site like Metacafe, your browser (Firefox, SeaMonkey - whatever) will crash instantly as it tries to load the Flash content on the home page.  This problem does not occur on 32-bit Linux. I've opened bug FP-1670 with bugs.adobe.com

The cropped screen capture in this post is of Twhirl 0.9 running on my 64-bit "Intrepid Ibex" Ubuntu 8.10 desktop.

5 comments:

  1. You can get rid of the black area surrounding the application windows (in the screenshot) by turning on "desktop/visual effects", which will launch a compositing window manager such as compiz.

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  3. AIR is not officially support on 64-bit Linux distros. The crash that you are seeing with MetaCafe is because of the swf that this page is loading (http://s.mcstatic.com/Flash/uuid_1.3.swf). A bug has been logged with AIR Linux for the same.

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  4. Tks Ashutosh. :-)

    Romil: AIR runs fine! It's Adobe Flash (alpha 64-bit) that crashes if an AIR app like Tweetdeck or Twhirl is running. If no AIR app is running, then the flash player doesn't crash. The AIR apps are very stable on 64-bit Linux. They have never crashed even once.

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  5. Flash Player 64-bit and AIR 32-bit are not compatible, hence the crash. If both were 32-bit or if both were 64-bit, things would be fine.

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