Because I like new toys, and because I am still not certain how to make sense of conversations in Twitter, I went looking for a better way to interface with Twitter. After a fair amount of searching, I concluded that TweetDeck would be as good as anything to try first.
I had a bit of a look around to see if there’s any specific mention of TweetDeck on Mandriva Linux. I found several nuggets of information that helped me get going relatively painlessly.
First I downloaded Adobe Air for Linux from Adobe’s website. I ticked the “Is executable” box under Properties in Dolphin. Double-clicking on the .bin file in Dolphin didn’t work so I renamed it to remove the extension. Then, just in case, I ran ldconfig as root in a console, as mentioned in this guide for Ubuntu. I don’t know if it mattered. I ignored all the stuff about libraries in that post, hoping that it was Ubuntu-specific and that my Mandriva setup wouldn’t present me with any such issues. I lucked out. The Air installer seemed to churn through all right.
Then, I downloaded TweetDeck itself. This also seemed fine, until I tried starting it up and tying it with my Twitter account, when it presented me with the following error:
Sorry, Adobe Air has a problem running on this computer.
Luckily I had found one thread in the Mandriva forum pertaining specifically to problems with Adobe Air on Mandriva, with the following comment by user Cairn Mitchell that had specifically caught my attention:
“The wallet has to be enabled at startup for some AIR apps to work
Kde wallet that is.”
I ran KWalletManager from the Kicker menu and then ran TweetDeck again. This time it ran smoothly. TweetDeck seems to work fine. KWalletManager asks for my password each time I run it though, which is a little bit annoying. I don’t know if there’s a setting within TweetDeck or KWalletManager that would avoid this.
As for my opinion on TweetDeck: well, it’s a lot better than Twitter’s web interface for organizing information. I don’t really tweet as yet, so I haven’t tested it as a conversation manager at all. What it has highlighted for me is that some people must seriously be attached to some web-connected device all of the time. Even more than I am!