Adobe AIR

Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime environment developed by Adobe Systems for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as desktop applications.

Installing Adobe AIR

Install the adobe-air-sdk^{AUR[broken link: package not found]} package.

Installing an AIR Application

Download the application, and unzip it to /opt/airapps/<appname>. To run it you can use the command

$ /opt/adobe-air-sdk/bin/adl -nodebug /opt/airapps/<Application name>/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /opt/airapps/<Application name>/

Making it executable

You can also make an executable by creating a file in /usr/local/bin:

 #!/usr/bin/sh
 /opt/adobe-air-sdk/bin/adl -nodebug /opt/airapps/<Application name>/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /opt/airapps/<Application name>/

The app might need parameters (voddler) so then the script can look like:

 #!/usr/bin/sh
 /opt/adobe-air-sdk/bin/adl -nodebug /opt/airapps/<Application name>/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /opt/airapps/<Application name>/ -- ${@}

Then chmod the file so that it can execute:

$ chmod +x filename

Now you have installed an application in AIR. Yes it is this silly :P

Removing the application

Delete the application folder in /opt/airapps. Also delete the executable if you created one.

Running binaries that use AIR

Some applications using Adobe AIR can come with their own binaries included. In this case, it is often better to run these binaries, rather than bypassing them using adl, to not lose any extra functionality these binaries might provide. These binaries will require some work however, before they can be used with the Adobe AIR SDK.

First of all, binaries will look for Adobe AIR, rather than the Adobe AIR SDK. There seems to be no way to change where to look, so you are going to have to symlink the Adobe AIR runtime provided with the SDK to the default location that binaries follow:

 # ln -s "/opt/adobe-air-sdk/runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/" "/opt/Adobe AIR"

With this, the binaries should be able to detect your Adobe AIR installation. It will leave you with two Adobe AIR folders in /opt, which is dirty but there seems to be no way around this for now.

Another problem you will run into is that whenever the AIR runtime starts a process, it will check whether you have accepted the EULA, something that is not included with the SDK. Since it cannot determine that you did, it then tries to run the Adobe AIR Updater, which is ALSO not included in the SDK runtime, causing the binary to fail and hang. To avoid this you are going to have to manually accept the EULA.

Warning: By creating the following file you are most likely accepting the Adobe AIR End User License Agreement. Make sure to read this agreement, and do not perform this work-around if you do not agree with it.

To manually accept the EULA, use this command:

echo -n 2 > ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/eulaAccepted

After this, you should clear the check and the binary should run normally.