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Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Installing Tweetdeck on Ubuntu 11.04

Now, I must gladly admit that I've fallen in love with Natty Narwhal. With Ubuntu, It has always been a love-hate relationship. I lost track of the number of times I've installed and uninstalled Ubuntu for the fact that it has always been a pain to cope with the messy linux commands to get things running. But with Natty Narwhal, things seem to be different. The unity launch pad is one unique thing about the Natty release, enabling ease of use to some extent for Linux illiterates like me. Trust me, you would be startled to know how easily I've installed Tweetdeck on Ubuntu 11.04 without the need to run any conventional $sudo apt-get install commands from the terminal.

Installing Adobe AIR

Unlike the former versions of Ubuntu you don't have to download the debian/rpm packages and run terminal commands to install AIR, Rather you will find this cute icon on the unity interface named 'Applications'. You can click on it and search for Adobe AIR in the search box, the 'Adobe Air' option would show up under the 'Available Apps To Download' column. And hereupon you will be redirected to the Ubuntu-Software-Center which is typically a simple GUI to help the user with the installation process.

PS: I wonder if the latest Adobe AIR for Linux is totally compatible with Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit version because I've found some glitches while trying to install AIR for a 64 bit version. That which I am not sure though. You might want to recheck the process if you are using a 64 bit version. Nevertheless it worked perfectly fine for the 32 bit version.


Installing Tweetdeck

After you are sure that AIR is installed correctly (cross check in the installed software menu items list within the Ubuntu Software Center), you can download Tweetdeck which typically comes in with an .air extension. All you need to do now is to try and open the tweetdeck.air installer with Adobe air. By default Ubuntu would open up the .air file as a package and show up the contents within it. To change this you can right click on the file and select properties, change the 'Opens with' option to Ubuntu-Software-Center. Now close the window and double click the tweetdeck.air file again which will now open up with the Ubuntu-Software-Center which will automatically open up the downloaded .air file with Adobe AIR and install it.

And that's it. You are done with installing Tweetdeck on your Ubuntu 11.04 without the need to touch upon the pain-in-the-ass sudo apt-get install commands from the terminal. :)