After many days of tries finally I managed to run Chandler Desktop on my Ubuntu. I had tried the binary installation but it didn't work, running chandler the following problem is reported:

$ chandler
...
ImportError: /home/andrea/.python-eggs/PyICU-0.8-py2.5-linux-i686.egg-tmp/_PyICU.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32

Fortunately you can always build it from sources. Unfortunately downloading the sources and compiling take much time and is not so easy know which packages you need to build it. To install all(? surely I missed someone) the needed packages do:

sudo apt-get install libicu-dev
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
sudo apt-get install python-gdata
sudo apt-get install ant
sudo apt-get install default-jdk
sudo apt-get install lib32icu38
sudo apt-get install curl

To get the sources and build them:

svn checkout http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk chandler
cd chandler
cd external
export BUILD_ROOT=$(pwd)
make world # wait ... wait ... wait

Now, if the build succeed you can run chandler with:

cd ../chandler
./chandler

If the build fails you, probably, need to install some package that I missed. To discover which package you can use google. For example if you got this error:

SWIG/_m2crypto.i:23: Error: Unable to find 'openssl/opensslv.h'

You should search on google these words "openssl/opensslv.h Ubuntu filelist", the first results should be the page of missing package, in this case is http://packages.ubuntu.com/feisty/amd64/libssl-dev/filelist So it's simple add the needed package:

apt-get install libssl-dev