What is Twhirl?
Twhirl is a desktop client for the popular microblogging service Twitter. It allows you to post short 140-character updates about what you are doing, as well as following your twitter friends and read all their updates, replies anyone sends to you, and direct messages to your account. You can also answer to another user by replying or sending him/her a private direct message.

Twhirl has a lot of other features, for example looking up other user’s profiles, searching public tweets (powered by terraminds, favoring tweets etc.

The latest version added support to post your updates to two other services, Pownce and Jaiku.

In this article we will show you how to install Twhirl along side with Adobe AIR on Ubuntu Linux 32bit and 64bit Platforms.




1: Download AdobeAIR SDK

Browse to http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air_linux.html and download the SDK from the very bottom of that page.

2: Create "AdobeAIRSDK" folder in your home folder and Extract the AdobeAIR SDK

$ mkdir ~/AdobeAIRSDK && tar -xvf adobeair_linux_sdk_b1_091508.tbz2 -C ~/AdobeAIRSDK

3: Download the Twhirl Client

Browse to http://twhirl.org/project/twhirl and download the latest package

4: Create "Twhirl" folder in your home folder and Extract the Twhirl Client

$ mkdir ~/Twhirl && unzip twhirl-0.8.6.air -d ~/Twhirl

5: Create a script to run the Twhirl Client with AdobeAIR

$ nano ~/twhirl.sh

Put the following, all in one line: ~/AdobeAIRSDK/bin/adl -nodebug ~/Twhirl/META-INF/AIR/application.xml ~/Twhirl

Ctrl-X to Save

6: Make your twhirl.sh script executable

$ chmod +x ~/twhirl.sh

7: Run your script from bash

$ ~/twhirl.sh