flashinthepan

Adobe^® AIR 1.1 for Linux is currently in beta and is almost feature complete. For anyone not in the know, the Adobe AIR runtime lets users run rich Internet applications from their desktop without a web browser across multiple operating systems.

There are some slick-looking AIR applications out there and I love eye candy, so when I heard there was a Linux version of Adobe AIR, I couldn’t wait to give it a whirl. Once I went to install it however, I was disappointed before I made it out of the gate. The installer for the Adobe AIR runtime for Linux requires that you are running a Linux distro with an RPM or Debian package management system. My distro of choice is Gentoo, so this wasn’t going to work.

Having run Gentoo Linux for a number of years, I am used to this sort of thing. Many software vendors shy away from supporting source based distros like Gentoo as they are “moving targets.” The element of choice introduced with such a source based distribution means that any two Gentoo Linux boxes could have dramatically different configurations.

The other part of being a Gentoo user however, means that I wasn’t going to give up in a hurry. I did some searching and some reading and managed to get Adobe AIR running on my x86 Gentoo laptop.

Here’s how I did it…

Part of the Adobe AIR SDK called ADL can be used to run Adobe AIR applications on non-RPM/Deb distributions like Gentoo.

Download the Adobe AIR SDK

1. Browse on over to http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/
   (thanks to thrstn for the updated link)
2. By clicking on the download link for the SDK, you are accepting the terms of the License Agreement.

Unpack the Downloaded Software

1. Create a directory for the runtime. I used /opt/AIR-SDK
2. Extract the AIR-SDK’s .tbz2 file in the directory you just created

cd /opt/AIR-SDK
tar jxvf /path/to/adobeair_linux_sdk_b1_091508.tbz2

3. Create another directory for Adobe AIR applications. I used /opt/AIR-apps

Download and Unpack an Adobe AIR Application

1. Download an Adobe AIR application. It will end in the extension .air
2. Create a subdirectory with the name of the application in the applications folder you created above. Example /opt/AIR-apps/application-name
3. Use unzip to extract the contents of the AIR application you downloaded

cd /opt/AIR-apps/application-name
unzip /path/to/application-name.air


Use ADL to launch your application…(the following is all on one line)

/opt/AIR-SDK/bin/adl -nodebug /opt/AIR-apps/application-name/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /opt/application-name

Enjoy your Adobe AIR applications!

Here are a couple of screenshots of AIR applications that I have installed…