Geeks In Action

I’ve been getting my Fedora 12 machine set the way I want it. I had done the upgrade from 11, ran into problems with my video card and ended up doing a full install. Now I’m putting it all back together.

My favorite Twitter client is Tweetdeck – which is an Adobe Air app. Installing Air went without a hitch but getting Tweetdeck, or anything else for that matter, was not working. The error message the installer gave me was, “Application crashed with an unhandled SIGSEGV” and then it would point me to a log file that was full of information. Unfortunately none of that information helped me to understand what the problem was. So I turned to trusty google and found my answers at this Technology and Investment Blog.

The answer to my issue was about half way down under the heading “Problems Running AIR Application”. It says there is an issue with SELinux – which I don’t totally get because I thought I turned SELinux off – but either way, I ran the command there and it fixed my issue. (I think it is probably an Adobe Air certificate issue – not SELinux) The blog links back to this Fedora Forum thread about Air – which also has some good information.

There are a million ways to post to microblog sites. Personally I’m a fan of identi.ca – so I post there using Pidgin. (I have it forwarded to twitter – so it shows up in both places.) Most of the people I want to follow are on twitter so I need a very good reader for twitter. So far my favourite is tweetdeck. My primary platform for this is Fedora 10. Fortunately tweetdeck is an Adobe AIR application and it runs on Linux, not all AIR apps do. Unfortunately there are some issues.

The biggest for me is getting the application to run. Once it is running – everything is fine but getting it started can be a royal pain. First I need to make sure that KDE Wallet is running. I don’t save my login information but it wont start unless kwallet is available and so I have to watch for that. Then, usually at least the first 10 times or so that I start the program it fails with an error that says, “Unable to connect to Twitter, please check your firewall.” It does this when the firewall is turned off. I’ve learned that if I just close the program and restart it over and over, eventually the error message does not show up and I can log in. Then we are fine.

Twhirl does the exact same thing except it just displays a little red icon and says that it had an error getting messages – but it doesn’t offer any suggestions. Once one of them is working then the other one will start fine. But if I close them both – then I get to go through the whole dance again to get things started. I only have this problem at work where http requests have to go through a proxy.

I use kde. I have the proxy settings set up for kde. I have gnome installed because I use some gnome apps – so I went ahead and set up proxy setting for gnome as well. I also have $http_proxy and $HTTP_PROXY set. I’ve tried setting $AIR_PROXY_SERVER and $AIR_PROXY_PORT – which is how it worked in the alpha release for Linux. None of it matters. I still get the same behaviour. It would make more sense to me if it never worked at all, but that it works after many tries is just odd. I may see if I can try out some other AIR apps and see if they do the same thing. Other AIR twitter clients I’ve tried so far didn’t work at all – so I couldn’t see if they had the same issue. Local twitter clients, like qwitter, that support proxy settings, work without issue. Below are screenshots of what I get to see multiple times every time I try to start tweetdeck or twhirl.

I’ve been using twhirl as my twitter client on my windows machine. Today I thought – I must see if I can use it on my Fedora 9 box at work. So I went on over to adobe and downloaded the beta Adobe Air installer for Linux. According to the installation notes – this binary will install an rpm or deb package, so to use it, your distro needs to support one of those. I’m using Fedora, so no problems. Once it was installed – I went to the twhirl page and did a normal install of twhirl. The one thing I did need to do is use root privileges to install air and then the twhirl app. I imagine this would be a problem for some. I’m not sure if there isn’t a way around this- I haven’t tried to find one.

So twhirl is working fine and I’m sending out tweets from my linux box. Pretty Cool.