Matthew Turland

It took some digging to find it, but I finally found a way to make Spaz work on the Ubuntu Ibex installation on my Sony Vaio VGN-NR298E (with an Intel C2D 64bit processor). Up until I figured this out, I had been getting nothing but a non-responsive black box when I tried to launch Spaz.

Most of this comes from this tutorial on getting Twhirl and other AIR-based apps running on Ubuntu 64bit.

1. Start by creating a new directory and and making it the current working directory. I just called it “Software” in my case.

   mkdir Software
   cd Software

2. Install the AIR 1.5 SDK for Linux.

   mkdir air_1.5_sdk
   cd air_1.5_sdk
   wget -c http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/air_1.5_sdk.tbz2
   bunzip2 air_1.5_sdk.tbz2
   tar -xf air_1.5_sdk.tar
   rm -f air_1.5_sdk.tar
   cd ..

3. Install Spaz.

   mkdir SpazAIR
   cd SpazAIR
   wget -c http://funkatron.com/getspaz
   unzip SpazAIR.air
   cd ..

4. If you’re running 64bit, install the getlibs installer so you can easily get 32bit versions of libraries that AIR needs. Otherwise, skip this step. I believe the KDE equivalent to the libgnome-keyring0 package is kdewallet. Both should be installed by default on 32bit systems.

   wget -c http://www.boundlesssupremacy.com/Cappy/getlibs/getlibs
   chmod +x ./getlibs
   ./getlibs libgnome-keyring.so.0 libgiogconf.so libgvfsdbus.so \
       libgioremote-volume-monitor.so

5. Launch Spaz from the directory created in the first step.

   air_1.5_sdk/bin/adl -runtime air_1.5_sdk/runtimes/air/linux \
       -nodebug SpazAIR/META-INF/AIR/application.xml SpazAIR

6. I didn’t find the default font used in the main tweet area to be very appealing, so I added this line to the User Theme CSS area of Settings.

   div.status-text { font-family: Tahoma; }

The only issue I ran into was receiving this error whenever I try to post: “An ActionScript error has occurred: Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2032: Stream Error.” Oddly, it doesn’t prevent posts from going through, though it is rather annoying. I have brought it up in a Spaz Google Group thread and hope to work with the developer to troubleshoot the issue further at some point in the future.