Then, download the latest TweetDeck Air application for Linux. Now here’s where I got the permissions issues. You have to run the TweetDeck installation as root, otherwise you will not be able to write to the /opt directory – that’s standard for Air applications, though I wasn’t able to write to /home/myuser either, although I had full rights to access that, so I guess the right place is actually /opt. Open your terminal, logon to root and try the following:

/usr/bin/Adobe AIR Application Installer

That should launch the Adobe AIR app installer. Pick the TweetDeck .air file and attempt to install it. Worked for me. You can create the shortcut icons, but you shouldn’t launch TweetDeck after installation, cause you wouldn’t wanna run it as root, right? After the setup’s finished check out your Applications – Accessories menu, you should see TweetDeck.

Hope that helped. Used to TwitterFox but I guess TwitterDeck will do just great. Don’t forget to choose the right tweets update configuration (I got it working at about 80%). Don’t overload the API and don’t forget to switch off any other Twitter clients you use before launching TwitterDeck.

Updating TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop on Fedora

I’ve stopped using TweetDeck for a while due to a couple of reasons. I got my Twitter developer account which gives me 20,000 API calls per hour (unlike the ordinary accounts with 100), and the new TweetDeck doesn’t work with that amount (I’ve no idea why), so I had to switch to Seesmic Desktop which is also based on Adobe AIR, thus cross-platform and I managed to install it on my Fedora 10 machine using the above method.

Updating TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop (and all other Adobe AIR applications) is quite straightforward in Windows and Mac, but I came up with the same permissions issues in Linux. It seems that we’re not allowed to use the auto-update feature (the popup-box that shows up when you run TweetDeck and asks you to automatically update the software). So we’ll probably have to go the other way round. Go to TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop official website and download the latest .AIR distro, save it somewhere, and as root run the AIR Application Installer program:

/usr/bin/Adobe AIR Application Installer

Select your .AIR file and update. After the update it automatically runs the new version of TweetDeck (or Seesmic Desktop). Close that. It’s being run under root, while your profile is on your regular user. Just start as a regular user and everything should be fine. Worked for me ;)

Good luck!

Updated June 20th 2009