Development and Howto02 May 2008 03:13 am

Running AIR applications w/o installing AIR on Linux

Recently, Adobe released an AIR client for Linux. Some people complained about the need for root privileges for not only installing AIR itself, but also for installing AIR applications. If you are worried about providing your root password to a binary, here is a work around.

  1. Download the AIR SDK
  2. Unzip the AIR SDK
  3. Download your favorite AIR application
  4. Unzip the .AIR file (yes, unzip it)
  5. /path/to/air_sdk/bin/adl -nodebug /path/to/air_application/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /path/to/air_application

For example, if you were to unzip the AIR sdk to ~/AIR-SDK and unzip Spaz to ~/spaz, the command for #5 would be

~/AIR-SDK/bin/adl -nodebug ~/spaz/META-INF/AIR/application.xml ~/spaz/

Good luck!

7 Responses to “Running AIR applications w/o installing AIR on Linux”

  1. on 08 Jan 2009 at 7:05 am   Executando aplicações AIR sem instalar o Adobe AIR no GNU/Linux | teia

    [...] aí eu descobri uma publicação no blog do Logan Buesching que ensina como executar aplicações AIR sem ter que [...]

  2. on 20 Apr 2009 at 12:07 pm   Adobe AIR und TweetDeck mit Userrechten unter Linux installieren « ___ rocketnote ___

    [...] dass ich das erst knapp 2 Wochen später durch Zufall gemerkt habe…). Ich beschreibe nun den Workaround im Zusammenhang mit [...]

  3. on 13 Aug 2009 at 12:37 pm   Phil M

    This isn’t working for me. Can you suggest a remedy?

    $ /tmp/adobeair_linux_sdk_a1_033108/bin/adl -nodebug \
    /tmp/TweetDeck_0_26/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /tmp/TweetDeck_0_26
    This application requires a version of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) which is no longer supported. Please contact the application author for an updated version.

    $ /tmp/adobeair_linux_sdk_a1_033108/bin/adl -nodebug \
    /tmp/SpazAIR/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /tmp/SpazAIR
    This application requires a version of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) which is no longer supported. Please contact the application author for an updated version.

  4. on 13 Aug 2009 at 1:26 pm   Logan

    This is only a guess and may be completely wrong, but I’d assume that the AIR SDK has been updated, and the executable “adl” will no longer run the applications built using the old SDK. Either download an old version of the SDK or wait until the application is built using the new SDK.

  5. on 13 Aug 2009 at 3:21 pm   Phil M

    Logan, can you suggest how to get an old copy of the SDK?

  6. on 13 Aug 2009 at 3:50 pm   Logan

    I don’t even know if that is the correct answer or if there was even an SDK update. You’ll be better off searching an Adobe Air developer forum for an answer as I don’t develop AIR applications.

  7. on 12 May 2010 at 11:55 am   bard

    I cringed when I saw my root password asked for a $HOME install. Your workaround worked beautifully (AIR 2 beta SDK at this time). Thank you, sir.