Adobe® AIR on Gentoo Linux
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
- Browse on over to http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/
(thanks to thrstn for the updated link) - By clicking on the download link for the SDK, you are accepting the terms of the License Agreement.
Unpack the Downloaded Software
- Create a directory for the runtime. I used /opt/AIR-SDK
- Extract the AIR-SDK’s .tbz2 file in the directory you just created
- Create another directory for Adobe AIR applications. I used /opt/AIR-apps
cd /opt/AIR-SDK
tar jxvf /path/to/adobeair_linux_sdk_b1_091508.tbz2
Download and Unpack an Adobe AIR Application
- Download an Adobe AIR application. It will end in the extension .air
- Create a subdirectory with the name of the application in the applications folder you created above. Example /opt/AIR-apps/application-name
- 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…
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Thanks for the post! I was anxiously waiting for someone to figure this out! To remove some of the annoyance out of the command-line there, I created a (very) simple bash script:
#!/bin/bash
AIR_PATH=/opt/AIR-SDK/bin/adl
APPS_PATH=/opt/AIR-apps
# this is all one line
${AIR_PATH} -nodebug “${APPS_PATH}/$1/META-INF/AIR/application.xml” “${APPS_PATH}/$1″
Thanks for the bash script Dan. That’s definitely a lot nicer to deal with.
Jason
Good post.
Nice post u have here
Added to my RSS reader
The linux Air SDK can now be found here: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/thankyou/linux.html
[...] instrucciones que he seguido se basan en un post de un tal Jason, que utiliza [...]
[...] Adobe Air on Gentoo Linux | flashinthepan [...]
Thanks a lot! That’s what i was looking for!
[...] A Solution was found which describes how to install the AIR SDK beta. now adobe air is currently in version 1.5 and while im not sure how the history works out but the links in the linked page were no longer correct, anyway, here is my (highly derivative) guide [...]
Here is an updated link to the SDK:
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/
I really appreciate this article. AIR is now running smoothly on my Sabayon box.
Great, this helped me a lot =)
Shouldn’t the last part of the command to run an app be: /opt/AIR-apps/application-name? (Think you forgot the AIR-apps part)
I get “Illegal instruction” when I run the SDK, the AIR installer. I can’t find the 1.1 version anywhere… anyone got a copy?
This is great. I was bummed when I couldn’t get the Pandora AIR app to run initially on my Gentoo boxes. The instructions here worked, and I don’t need to have a browser open to use Pandora any more. Yay!
Awesome guide. Worked perfectly for me except rather than install everything to /opt, I installed everything to ~/local and adjusted the Bash script accordingly. I figure that unless you run a multi-user system where the users use the desktop, run this all from within your /home directory.
Hi
Just wanted to point out that AIR-Linux, has been out of beta for a long time now, its at par with AIR on windows. Download the latest version from: http://get.adobe.com/air/
“The other part of being a Gentoo user however, means that I wasn’t going to give up in a hurry.”
This! This is me right now. It’s five in the morning. My Pandora free ran out so I upgraded to Pandora premium and want to run the payer… which runs on adobe Air.
Thank you for posting this. Bookmarked for tommorrow.
I used your instructions to get the download manager for Shockhound (a music download site) to work in Gentoo ~amd64. I had to first install it in a Windows 7 VM to get the .air files (they were in C:\Program Files (x86)\Shockhound Download Manager. Many thanks.
Excellent post!
I had an extra issue because I’m an Awesome user, but there’s documentation on the Adobe website which got me past that final speedbump and lets me run AIR apps as well ( http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/492/cpsid_49267.html –> check the bottom of the page)