Installing Tweetdeck on Gentoo

Posted on Mar 11, 2010

I mainly use Tweetdeck on my Mac Book Pro, but I thought it would be nice to have everything on one computer. I was using qtwitter for a while, but the problem with that program is that I see everyone’s tweets in one column. I don’t get to see mentions in a separate column, nor can I separate things either.

I had to bypass Tweetdeck’s download process. Normally you go to tweetdeck.com and click on the download link. This wants to launch AdobeAIR, this is great and easy, however Gentoo is not supported. What I ended up doing was looking at the source of the page and getting the full URL to the AIR package. I copied the URL and downloaded it.

The next step was to download AdobeAIR SDK. I went to: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=airsdk



cd /opt
mkdir /opt/AdobeAIR
cd AdobeAIR
tar xjf /path/to/AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2
cd ..
mkdir AdobeAir-Apps
mkdir AdobeAir-Apps/Tweetdeck
cd AdobeAir-Apps/Tweetdeck
unzip /path/to/TweetDeck_0_33.2.air

To run Tweetdeck:



/opt/AdobeAir-Apps/Tweetdeck/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /opt/AdobeAir-Apps/Tweetdeck

One issue I ran into was getting type and kwallet errors (since I was running KDE). I thought by turning off kwallet the problem would go away, but it didn’t. I found this article by Adobe.

  1. Make sure Gnome Keyring or KWallet is running:
    

        ps -aef | grep -i 'gnome.*keyring'
        ps -aef | grep -i kwallet
  2. Reset Gnome Keyring or if you’re running KDE, make sure that the KWallet subsystem is not disabled. Open KWallet and make sure there is a default wallet. If there is no default wallet, then create one.
    

    rm -rf ~/.gnome2/keyrings/
    mkdir -p ~/.gnome2/keyrings
  3. Reset the AIR application data: 
    

    rm -rf ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/ELS
  4. Try the application again. In my case, since I was using KDE, I ended up creating another wallet for Tweetdeck.

If you decide to switch from Gnome to KDE or KDE to Gnome you will need to reset the AIR application data (Step 3).