Seth Yates

UPDATE: Further fiddling confirms the FAIL (below).

UPDATE: Reported bug and found a workaround for VMWare (below).

The upgrade from 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) to 8.04 (Hardy Heron) has not been smooth for me:

• Auto-detect sound did not work initially.  I installed the i386 kernel modules which broke networking.  Reverting to generic kernel modules seems to have fixed both networking as well as sound.  Very odd. UPDATE: Hold that.  It fixed it for a short while.  Its broken again on the generic kernel.  Setting the sound settings to ALSA instead of Autodetect works around the issue.  Symptom is when you try to play any sound, you get the message “audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=music: Failed to connect stream: Invalid argument”.  I’ll be opening a bug report about this later in the weekend.
  UPDATE 2: Looks like its a common bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/191027
• Firefox 3.0b5 is installed by default, breaking all of my add ons.  Will have to try to downgrade back to Firefox 2.0. UPDATE: Rolling back to firefox-2 wasn’t very smooth either.  Stuck with 3.0b5 for now, waiting for the add ons to catch up.
• Looks like compiz-fusion was uninstalled, breaking my theme (bye bye Aero look).  Will have to investigate.  UPDATE: Turns out that only ‘emerald –replace’ was dropped out of Sessions.  Added that back in and presto! Aero look back.  Happy again.
• The Awm dock is buggered, with the launcher icons floating well above the dock.  UPDATE: Still buggered.
• And worst for last…VMWare no longer works as it depends on vmware-server-kernel-modules and libssl0.9.7 which I can’t get to install.  Will also have to investigate.  UPDATE: The instructions to get this working are here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4357442&postcount=10

So far, not too impressed…

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The Twhirl Adobe AIR application is a great client for Twitter. Unfortunately, neither Twhirl or Adobe AIR officially support Linux (yet). Having recently switched to Ubuntu for my primary OS at home, I’ve been missing Twhirl. Knowing that Adobe AIR supports Mac OSX, I decided to see if there was a Linux edition in the works. Turns out there is an Alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux. Armed with this, I decided to give it a go. Here’s how to install Adobe AIR and Twhirl on Ubuntu (current for 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon). Please note that Adobe AIR for Linux is still Alpha and is a bit unstable. There, you’ve been warned. Now for the fun:

1. Open the Terminal
2. Run the following commands:

cd ~/Desktop
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
wget http://www.twhirl.org/files/twhirl-0.8.air
chmod +x adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
sudo ./adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

3. The installation then presents the following dialog:

4. Click on “I Agree” and it commences installation (into /opt/Adobe AIR - yes, with a space in the path):

5. If all goes well, then you get the following screen.

6. Back in Terminal, run the following command:

/opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/airappinstaller ~/Desktop/twhirl-0.8.air

7. The first thing you get is this very frightening dialog:

Hm. UNRESTRICTED access to my computer. What could possibly go wrong? Click “Install” to find out.

8. Next, you get the twhirl installation preferences dialog. Set the preferences you want and click “Continue”:

9. Once the installation is done, Twhirl will open. Sign in to your Twitter account. Having run Twhirl on Ubuntu for several hours, I’ve managed to make it crash or simply disappear several times. Adobe AIR on Linux is indeed ALPHA quality currently. I’ve found that changing some of the default settings has made it more stable. First, untick “hide when minimised”:

10. Then click on Notify and untick “show notification windows” (found that the notification windows would sometimes play up with the window manager):

11. Click Save, and you should be twitterhappy with Twhirl on Ubuntu.

Addendum: The default icon on the Twhirl launcher is the generic AIR icon. If you want to change this so you can easily identify it as Twhirl, follow these steps:

1. Right click on the Twhirl launcher on the Desktop and select Properties:

2. Click on the red AIR icon on the upper-left.

3. Enter or navigate to /opt/twhirl/icons/twhirl-48.png and click Open.

4. Click Close and then you can drag/drop the launcher to your main menu or window manager.

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