In my continued effort to ween myself off VMware (slow start speed, many gigs to copy every time I get a new computer) I decided to invest some time this afternoon toward getting one of my essential tools, Balsamiq Mockups, to work on 64-bit Precise Pangolin. I had assumed this would be impossible, so was stunned to find that it’s not only possible, but pretty darned easy. Here are the steps that I cobbled together from a few sources to get it working fast:
Install Adobe Air
wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0
sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
The middle bit makes some symlinks so that Adobe Air can access gnome keyring (required for install). If you’re running 32-bit Pangolin, those two steps are slightly different:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0
Install Balsamiq
wget http://builds.balsamiq.com/b/mockups-desktop/MockupsForDesktop64bit.deb
sudo dpkg -i MockupsForDesktop64bit.deb
Or if you’re running 32-bit:
wget http://builds.balsamiq.com/b/mockups-desktop/MockupsForDesktop32bit.deb
sudo dpkg -i MockupsForDesktop32bit.deb
Yay For Easy
Thanks to Linux.org for the guidance on installing Adobe Air. The steps on Adobe’s own site are an awful mess.