Installing Mozilla Prism on Ubuntu Gutsy

Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps. Prism let's user run web applications right from their desktop. It's a great initiative and an offline integration is close on its heels.

Prism packages are not out yet in the gutsy repository. So, let me show you how to install and configure prism..

1. Get the package
$ wget http://starkravingfinkle.org/projects/webrunner/prism-0.8-linux.tar.bz2


2. Extract the archive into /opt
$ sudo tar jxvf prism-0.8-linux.tar.bz2 -C /opt


3. Change the permissions
$ sudo chown -R root:root /opt/prism/
$ sudo chmod -R 755 /opt/prism/


4. You can either run it from shell
$ /opt/prism/prism

or, create a menu entry



$ sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/prism.desktop

add these lines in
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Prism
Comment=Prism
Exec=/opt/prism/prism
Icon=/opt/prism/chrome/icons/default/webrunner48.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Network;
StartupNotify=true


5. Launch prism, select the URL of your web applications and the shortcut options.





6. Start using your first desktop-prism-app



7. Now, you can create your own suite of desktop-web apps. From an end-user point of view, these apps launch and feel like normal traditional apps. You can add them to your applications menu, desktops, launchers etc.




Tip: If it complaints of missing plugins, copy or link your firefox plugins folder to your prism folder
$ sudo cp -r /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/ /opt/prism/