Adobe AIR apps and Linux - Tweetdeck particularly

So I ran into an interesting issue yesterday. I decided to give TweetDeck a shot. I wanted to get hashtagged search results as a feed. TweetDeck can do it. Thwirl cant.

So I make sure I have the latest TweetDeck and fire it up.

Er...what's this black window I see? I can't click on anything. The main canvas is grey and the only thing I get is tooltips on mouseover of the buttons. Nothing works.

So I do some research and find out that this appears to be a known problem. No one has been able to down exactly what's going on. Some people were mentioning that starting kwallet solved the problems while other's said that it was gnome-keyring. My brain started churning.

I started to think back to when I installed AIR on my desktop and when I installed TweetDeck. It was right after I left MediaOcean. I was setting up my desktop at home to be more like the setup I had at work so I could stay in the same mindset while looking for a job. That's when it clicked.

I installed the AIR runtime while I was running KDE. One thing AIR boasts under Linux is integration with either kwallet or gnome-keyring. I wonder if maybe it "locks" that choice in place during install. Well I run through a few quick tests which involve installing and uninstalling AIR , removing some dotfiles and directories where settings are stored. Nothing seems to work.

Here's what finally worked:

• Drop to a shell.
• Remove the package that provides kwalletd


jvincent@jvxps:~$ dpkg-query -S /usr/bin/kwalletd
kdebase-runtime-bin-kde4: /usr/bin/kwalletd
jvincent@jvxps:~$ sudo apt-get remove kdebase-runtime-bin-kde4
[sudo] password for jvincent:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libclucene0ldbl apache2-utils libxine1-x librdf0 kdebase-runtime-data-common php5 libxine1-misc-plugins kdelibs5 libxcb-xv0 kde-icons-oxygen libxine1-bin libexiv2-5 librasqal1 apache2-mpm-prefork libsoprano4 redland-utils
apache2.2-common kdelibs5-data cvs libxcb-shape0 phonon-backend-gstreamer libstreamanalyzer0 libphonon4 libsvnqt5 kdelibs-bin libstreams0 exiv2 php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 libxcb-shm0 soprano-daemon kdebase-runtime-data
php5-common libxine1-console libxine1
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
cervisia cvsservice kdebase-runtime kdebase-runtime-bin-kde4 kdesvn kdesvn-kio-plugins khelpcenter4 kompare
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 8 to remove and 30 not upgraded.
After this operation, 17.8MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?


• One thing to watch carefully is the list of packages that will be removed. I did this on my desktop and it wanted to remove Amarok. I figured I could reinstall Amarok if I needed to after the test.
• Once that was done, I uninstalled AIR and all the apps I had installed (in this case, TweetDeck and Thwirl).
• Backup and remove the .appdata directory from your home directory. I'm not sure if this step is absolutely required but I did it anyway.

Make note of any other packages you want to reinstall.
After that, I reinstalled the AIR runtime and TweetDeck. TweetDeck was working!

So what's the dealie yo? Well it appears there are two issues:

• Which ever keychain you are using when you install AIR (gnome-keyring for gnome and kwallet for kde) becomes the default keyring for the life of the AIR installation. I realized later that when I switched back to Gnome, Thwirl was always asking for my password even when I told it to save it. Now I know why.
• It appears that Kwallet is the DEFAULT keychain used if you have it installed. That's why I had to fully uninstall KDE just to install AIR. I run under Gnome again. I don't use any KDE apps other than Amarok. Kwallet may not always be running.

I have yet to reinstall Amarok again so I don't know what will happen once kwallet is available but it appears to me that Adobe needs to fix this behaviour. Maybe give the user an option to choose which vault will be used at install time or possibly someone can create an application that can switch the vault from kde to gnome or vice versa.