Installing Adobe AIR in Fedora 11

So here it goes, I wanted to install twhirl and was required to install Adobe AIR of course, however, I got this error several times.

Sorry, an error has occured.
An error occured while installing Adobe AIR. Installation may not be
allowed by your administrator. Please contact your administrator.

Apparently, I have several dependencies to install. So here are the steps to make it work.

1. Issue the following commands.

su -c "yum install gtk2-devel rpm-devel"

(Its very similar to Ubuntu (if you have used one), that every AIR app you install will have a .deb equivalent, in this case a .rpm.)

2. Download Adobe AIR.
Download Link

3. Install it by issuing the following commands.

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
su -c "./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin"

4. Now AIR is installed, but mostly will not be able to install via its Adobe AIR Application Installer UI or give you an "Error #5100"; install apps via its terminal command.

Adobe\ AIR\ Application\ Installer /media/Shared/Downloads/twhirl-0.9.2.air

(be sure to explore to the apps directory, rather than changing to its directory)

Now you should have a successfull Adobe AIR installation!

Credit goes to, Dustin Patterson, I just made it simplier. =)

Applications Menu Missing

Today, I was experimenting with my Ubuntu, when I noticed that my Applications menu in my panel had no contents, only Places and System. I did a little search and found a solution in the Ubuntu forums. To restore it back, issue the folllowing commands in the terminal.

rm /home/[yourUsername]/.config/menus/applications.menu

This will remove your current configuration, and reset a new config. After that, your Applications menu should be restored back to default.

Get Dropbox to Work on Jaunty Jackalope

I did a fresh install yesterday, and I got a problem on installing the latest Dropbox. The error was like this,

The program 'dropbox' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadIDChoice (invalid resource ID chosen for this connection)'.
(Details: serial 734 error_code 14 request_code 53 minor_code 0)
(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

To get it working, I did the following,
1. Install Dropbox's nautilus and daemon package

2. Download latest build of Dropbox (as of April 28, 2009), here

3. Issued the following command on the terminal

cd ~

rm -r .dropbox-dist/

tar -xzf dropbox-lnx.x86-0.6.510.tar.gz

4. Restart nautilus (I did a logout)

and voila! Dropbox is now working!

Credit goes to Adam Michael Roach, I modified it to fit the current versions and releases.

Adding JAVA_HOME in Ubuntu

I've been using linux (specifically Ubuntu) for quite some time now, I've been trying to migrate to linux from windows. One of the first thing I've encountered is adding an environment variable. Compared to windows, its very similar, only that you have multiple ways to do it. One way I find to be the easiest is by adding it to /etc/environment file. So here's how to do it.

1. Open /etc/environment as root in gedit (or any text editor you have)

sudo gedit /etc/environment

2. Add the following lines (remember to change the version to what you are also using).

JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun"

3. Save it and log-off or restart you machine, that's it!

You can also add other variables like your MAVEN_HOME or anything you want.