30 November 2008

How to Install Flock in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex


Alright, I stumbled across this relatively new browser called Flock. Flock is made by Mozilla and, as opposed to Firefox, is designed to focus on the social aspect of the internet (i.e. Digg, Facebook, Blogger, etc.). According to their site, "When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites."

Unfortunately, as of now, downloading and installing Flock was not made easy for us linux users, and especially not for us Ubuntu noobs. So I have made a quick tutorial of how to download and install it using the GUI way. If I get the time to figure out how to do it via terminal, I'll update this post.


How to install Flock in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex... for uber noobs.

UPDATE: You can download a .deb version of Flock making your job much, much easier. Using GDebi to install the .deb is as simple as pie (errr... eating left-over Thanksgiving pumpkin pie). If you really need help figuring out how to use GDebi (it's pretty self-explanatory) you can post a comment and I'll explain it otherwise you can just look at this extremely short summary of how to use it. ~ Thanks to Vadi for bringing this even easier method to my attention.

But if you still want to do it my alternative method...

  • You can use Synaptic Package Manager to figure out if you have the latest libstdc++ installed.

  • Download the latest version of Flock from http://www.flock.com/download/versions [In this case I will be downloading the English (US) 2.0.2 version]. For ease, download it to your /home/**** folder where you change "****" with your user name.

  • Open the .tar.bz2 with Archive Manager [You can just double click it] and make sure you extract the folder in /home/**** [it doesn't really matter where you save the .tar.bz2, but where you extract the file to does matter.
  • Now open the folder "flock" which should now be towards the top of /home/**** and go down to the file labeled "flock-browser". Open this folder to begin the installation.

  • Now you are going to have to get your hands a little dirty with the terminal. Open the terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in the following:
sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/Flock.desktop
  • Once you have put in your password, you will be opened up to a blank file. In this file paste the following (replace **** with your username!):
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Flock
Comment=Flock Web Browser
Exec=/home/****/flock/flock-browser
Icon=/home/****/flock/icons/mozicon128.png
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Applications;Network

2 comments:

  1. Normal people can install 1 .deb pacakge via double-clicking and be done: http://www.getdeb.net/search.php?keywords=flock

    :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I updated the how-to to include that uber easy method. Thanks Vadi!

    ReplyDelete

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