How To Install RSSOwl (RSS News Reader) on Linux

Consider this as the missing installation guide for RSSOwl on Linux. After spending hours trying to get it working I finally figured it out.

How to install RSSOwnl (RSS Reader) on Linux

Note: The instructions may have some Fedora / RHEL bias as I use Fedora Linux, but it is expected to work on all Linux variants.

1. Download RSSOwl binary for Linux
2. Extract the rssowl folder (along with its sub-folders)
3. You may copy the directory to /opt (as root or using sudo) so all users of the machine can share the same application binaries. Individual user preferences are saved in ~/.rssowl2 directory. This step is optional.
4. Find out the latest 1.5.x installation of Firefox on your machine. If it is not there you need to install firefox using yum. Say it is version 1.5.0.12.Installing or using Firefox isn’t the only option. You can use xulrunner too. Note: My attempts to install with higher versions of Firefox failed. I don’t know whether that it because they were installed directly from Firefox site and not as rpm (because rpm’s often include xulrunner) or because higher versions aren’t supported. Frankly I din’t waste time on finding it out. I was happy that it was finally working after lot of effort.
5. Write a script named rssowl in rssowl directory with the following lines:

   export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.12
   cd "`dirname $0`"
   nohup ./RSSOwl > /dev/null &

6. Open /opt/rssowl/RSSOwl?.ini and change it as follows:

   -vmargs
   -Xms15m
   -Xmx512m

7. Now you can run rssowl as (path may be different depending on where you installed it):

   /opt/rssowl/rssowl

8. You may create a shortcut for it on the desktop and / or quick launcher for convenience. Again this step is optional.