Thursday, May 1, 2008

Google Gears on Ubuntu 7.x

When trying to install Google Gears on Firefox on Ubuntu 7.x, I failed miserably; The Firefox add-on manager would claim to install Gears, but after a Firefox restart, gears would still not be installed.

Fortunately, I was not the only one having this problem, and the others facing this problem already found a solution. Details can be found, e.g., here.

A quick summary of the problem and the solution: the problem is that Gears uses a C++ library that is not installed by default on Ubuntu 7.x. The solution is easy though, run

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

to install the missing library, restart Firefox, revisit gears.google.com, and off you go!