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HOWTO: Install Gears on 64-bit Linux

2009 January 4 1652

I recently noticed that Wordpress added support for Gears, as have a few other sites, including ZohoOffice and MySpace.

Gears is essentially offline storage for rich Internet application data. GoogleOS has a list of Gears-enabled sites/applications. Read more on Gears at Wikipedia.

Much to my dismay, the only officially-available Firefox extension supports only 32-bit operating systems. I’m a 64-bit Linux user. Specifically, I use Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid with my ASUS M3A32-MVP motherboard and 8 GB of DDR2 RAM (4GB of Geil and 4 GB of OCZ).

Fortunately, Gears is an open source project and one intrepid developer made a Gears Firefox extension package which supports 64-bit Linux.

I downloaded and installed the package by dragging and dropping it onto the Firefox Addons dialog, then restarting Firefox when prompted. I archived the Gears extension package on my own site in the event the package is suddenly no longer available. Be sure to check for new versions though, since this package may be out of date if you’re reading this post more than a few days after publication (though unlikely).

Huzzah for open source.

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6 Comments

  1. Colin Dean:

    A newer version is available at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~swolchok/gears/.

    24 February 2009, 6:44 pm

  2. Colin Dean:

    It appears that the above archive is no longer valid.

    Someone else is building packages and posting them to http://nielspeen.com/blog/2009/02/google-gears-64-bit/.

    23 June 2009, 5:38 pm

  3. Colin Dean:

    It looks like Niel Speen is running behind. Someone at the Australian National Institute of Economic and Industry Research packaged Gears 0.5.32.0 for x86_64 with a caveat that the link might disappear in a few days. I tried it out; it works fine.

    I’ve archived Gears 0.5.32.0 for Firefox x86_64/amd64 in my open source software archive.

    The XPI won’t work with Firefox 3.6 (I tried). Firefox 3.5 is soooo last month.

    I don’t know how much longer I’ll continue to keep up with this, as I’ve all but switched to Chromium.

    11 August 2009, 10:34 pm

  4. Colin Dean:

    It should be noted that Celogeek wrote out brief instructions of how to compile Gears for yourself.

    svn checkout http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gears-read-only
cd gears-read-only/
wget http://gkovacs.xvm.mit.edu/google-gears-firefox-3.5-x86_64/gears-gcc433.diff
patch -p0 -i gears-gcc433.diff
make -C gears clean
make -C gears -j3 MODE=opt #(enlever MODE= pour avoir la version debug, marche avec des warnings de compilation)
#Pour l'installer :
firefox ./gears/bin-opt/installers/gears-linux-opt-*.xpi
    11 August 2009, 10:41 pm

  5. JBaris:

    Thanks Colin. Its works fine !

    Regards

    3 November 2009, 3:48 pm

  6. The Flow of Consciousness » Blog Archive » 2009 Year in Review: Writing, stocks, coding, and more:

    [...] article on how to install Gears on 64-bit Linux continues to see quite a bit of traffic. I even host a copy of Gears, even though it’s likely [...]

    2 January 2010, 4:30 pm

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