Land of the diff(1) fish

I’ve been using TweetDeck. I think it’s a great app and I’ve been really happy with it. So I tried to get it to work on my 64bit Gentoo system. After a lot of work and googling, I managed to get it to work but no one place gave me the whole story. So I decided to write up how I got it to work in the hope that it will help someone else. Oh and, if anything I tell you to do here breaks your machine, not my fault.

First thing we need is the Air SDK. Go get it here.
Next we need to make a couple of directories.

# mkdir /opt/AIR-SDK
# mkdir /opt/AIR-APPS

Next unpack the SDK into /opt/AIR-SDK

# cd /opt/AIR-SDK
# tar jxf /path/to/AirSDK.tbz2

Now we need to get an app. I used TweetDeck. Download the .air file and unpack it in /opt/AIR-APPS/

# mkdir /opt/AIR-APPS/TweetDeck
# cd /opt/AIR-APPS/TweetDeck
# unzip /path/to/TweetDeck.air

Now the real fun begins.
You may want to read up on Gentoo Overlays if you’re not familiar with them. You’ll need to emerge layman and add the multilib overlay.

# emerge layman
# echo "source /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf" >> /etc/make.conf
# layman -a multilib
# emerge --sync

There are several ways to proceed from here. You can add the 32bit libs you need to /etc/portage/package.use one by one adding the lib32 flag. You can find a list of them here.
As far as I can tell, you’ll need at least

sys-libs/ncurses
media-libs/alsa-lib
sys-libs/glibc
sys-libs/zlib
dev-libs/nss
dev-libs/openssl
dev-libs/nspr

This isn’t what I did so this list may be incomplete. If you find something I missed, please let me know and I’ll add it.
I found it simpler to add lib32 to my USE flags in /etc/make.conf and rebuild world. I also removed lib32 from
www-client/mozilla-firefox and net-libs/xulrunner to save a little time. You will also probably need to add

SETARCH_ARCH_x86=“i686”

to your make.conf

# emerge -avuDN world

This can take a long time depending on what you have installed. You also need to make sure that you have either kwallet or gnome-keyring running. At this point you should have a working Air Install. To run your new app

$ /opt/AIR-SDK/bin/adl -nodebug /opt/AIR-APPS/TweetDeck/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /opt/AIR-APPS/TweetDeck/

Replace TweetDeck with the name of your app. If you get a complaint about the Encrypted Storage, try removing ~/.appdata

$ rm -rf ~/.appdata

Hurray! You’ve got a working AIR installation!
If you’re not running Gnome or KDE you may have an error.

Unknown desktop manager, only Gnome and KDE are supported.

If you’re running XFCE you can try this

export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=”xfce”.

I hope this helps!

EDIT: I’ve sort of switched to StumpWM from KDE4. To use kwallet instead of gnomekeyring use the following.


export KDE_FULL_SESSION=1
export KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4


This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 6:20 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.