How to install Balsamiq Mockups on Ubuntu 13.10

I have made a new set of instructions for Installing Balsamiq Mockups on Ubuntu 13.10 because it it is slightly different from installing it on Ubuntu 13.04.

Step 1 – Download Adobe Airhttp://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin.

wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Step 2: Make the installer excutable.

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Step 3: Try running the installer.

sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Step 4: If your computer is 64bit then you will get this error:

"error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"  

So, you will need to install the 32bit libs:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-0:i386 libnss3-1d:i386 libnspr4-0d:i386 lib32nss-mdns libxml2:i386 libxslt1.1:i386

Step 5: Try running the installer again

sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Step 6: You might get this error:

Sorry, an error has occurred. Adobe AIR could not be installed. Install either Gnome Keyring or KDE KWallet before installing Adobe AIR.

To fix this run the following command:

locate libgnome-keyring.so

I got (but you might get something different).

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0

You will need to pass reference to these libs when running the installer.

sudo LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

If this works for you then goto Step 7. If this doesn’t work then you could make symbolic links to the libs. For 64bit:

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

For 32 bit:

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

Finally – try running the installer again.

sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Then remove the symbolic links:

sudo rm /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0
sudo rm /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0

Step 7 – Download Balsamiq

wget http://builds.balsamiq.com/b/mockups-desktop/MockupsForDesktop64bit.deb

Step 8 – Install Balasmiq

sudo dpkg -i MockupsForDesktop64bit.deb

Step 9 – Make a cup of tea and some mockups

18 thoughts to “How to install Balsamiq Mockups on Ubuntu 13.10”

  1. Unfortunately this and many other similar methods didn’t work for me (fresh Ubuntu 13.10 with Gnome3). I managed to get AdobeAIR to *think* it was installed, as in, it would (sometimes) load up the install screen and it would state that “AdobeAIR” is already installed, however then when I attempted to install Balsamiq via the deb it said requirement AdobeAIR wasn’t met…

    What did work was to simply install WINE and then ‘With Adobe Air bundled’ version provided at http://balsamiq.com/download/

    1. Thanks for your feedback. I haven’t been able to try this on a computer with Gnome 3 installed myself. It would be interested to see if anyone else get this problem.

  2. After installing the 32bit libs and trying to install AIR again, I get this error message:
    /tmp/air.wCK2DP/setup: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

    Apparently
    apt-get install lib32stdc++6
    fixed it but am now stuck with the AIR installer not starting. Any suggestions why this might be? I have Ubuntu 13.10 with KDE running on top.

    1. Found out the problem was with 13.10. Problem now resolved by installing quite a lot of stuff from Raring.

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