Eat The Path - Installing Pandora under (Ubuntu) Linux

I had a strange problem installing the new Pandora One desktop player under Ubuntu Linux. I had previously installed the beta Pandora desktop player, and the Adobe AIR app installer complained that it couldn’t install the new client over the old one.

I couldn’t find a clean way to uninstall the old one, so I just removed it from /opt/Pandora manually. When I tried to install the new player, the installation failed as follows:

I did some digging and discovered that it’s possible to capture installer logs per Adobe’s knowledge base article “Logging Adobe AIR 1.5 application and runtime installations.” It turns out that the AIR installer for Linux (or at least Debian-derived distributions like Ubuntu) uses dpkg to install AIR packages. Here’s the line that tipped me off:

subinstaller: Error occurred; beginning rollback: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text=" error: dpkg: error processing /tmp/FlashTmp.mdgH0a/setup.deb (--install): received unknown message type from subinstaller: received unknown message type from subinstaller: trying to overwrite/opt/Pandora/bin/Pandora’, which is also in package com.pandora.pandora.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1`

When I removed the Pandora directory by hand, there was still an entry in the dpkg database, as shown here:

$ dpkg -l | grep -i pandora
ii  com.pandora.pandora.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1

I removed the package (sudo apt-get remove com.pandora.pandora.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1) and everything worked great.

I realize this is even less interesting to most of you than usual, but Pandora doesn’t officially support Linux, so I want to make sure that this gets written down somewhere in case somebody else has the same problem.

Comments

from Jeremy

July 8, 2009 16:06

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Precisely what I was looking for. Thank you for being smart and figuring this out so I didn’t have to. I was about to unleash my giant army of sharks with lasers on Adobe, but now I can just enjoy my music instead.

This might help future travelers via Google machine: “Sorry, an error has occurred. The application could not be installed. Try installing it again. If the problem persists, contact the application author. Error #1”

from Jon Chambers

July 16, 2009 10:12

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Glad to have helped!

I had hoped the alt text on the image would get picked up by the Googletron 9000, but I certainly appreciate the extra content weighting. Cheers!

from Jonathan Chang

August 3, 2009 18:19

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Thanks! This worked!

from pianom4n

September 20, 2009 23:38

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Thanks for the tip.

For those whose controls are being shoved off the screen, I found a solution. Install the msttcorefonts package, reset your font cache with “sudo fc-cache -fv”, and then restart the pandora one app.

The controls should now fit on the screen (not perfect, but almost).

from Max

September 23, 2009 13:03

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Hey, I don’t want to hear that nonsense about this “not being interesting” - fact is you saved me (and many others, I’m sure) a lot of time and headache.

This worked great, thanks a lot dude!!

from Phil

October 7, 2009 15:47

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The Pandora One app installed like a champ for me under 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10. The only problem is that I get an error saying “Your computer is having trouble connecting to the network.” Anyone else have any experience with this? It starts up fine, it just won’t connect.

from Phil

October 7, 2009 15:52

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Crap, I meant Ubuntu 9.04. Forgot I went back to 9.04 after trying the 9.10 Beta.

from Phil

October 7, 2009 16:18

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Got it figured out, in case any other Googlers find their way here. I was missing a dependency that getlibs must have missed. In my case, it was “lib32nss-mdns” though to be sure, you should probably install all of the dependencies I found:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32nss-mdns lib32asound2 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32z1 libc6 libc6-i386 lib32nss-mdns libcanberra-gtk-module

Jon, maybe you’ll want to add that to your guide, just in case it saves anyone from similar headaches. Otherwise, great guide and I’m loving not having Pandora rely on an open Firefox tab anymore! Only thing it’s missing is integration with the media keys/shortcuts on my keyboard!

from Tom

October 25, 2009 22:06

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Would anyone help me out and tell w the package name for the Pandora desktop is and what universe is it in if I install via Synaptic?

from hortert

October 27, 2009 03:23

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The tips worked for me. thank you

from Jon Chambers

October 29, 2009 21:22

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Tom,

I don’t believe Pandora is available for installation as a package from any repository. You can install it as an Air app from Pandora’s site if you’re a Pandora One subscriber. If you’ve already installed it and need to remove it, you can find the name of the package with dpkg -l | grep -i pandora.

from Alex

December 22, 2009 23:23

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http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1362256

check this out

from David Mcanulty

February 4, 2010 16:20

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had this exact same problem on fedora 7 (I’m sure it affects any linux distro using rpm still).

rpm -qa |grep pandora showed the entry: com.pandora.pandora.####.1-1-1

to remove it I did a: rpm -e com.pandora.pandora.####.1-1-

Installing Pandora under (Ubuntu) Linux

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