First off, let me say it is not pretty, second the instructions on the Abode website are better suited for trying to get a man on Mars than getting Air to work in Linux x64, and they are specific for Fedora 9 and 10 x64…  There are also instructions for installing Adobe Air 2 on Fedora 11, but 2 is not an available install from the drop down menu on the install page.  One last important point, then we shall get started… once again Adobe has ONLY MADE A 32bit APPLICATION VERSION, which is why there is an issue in the first place, the second issue is that once again the great big $$$ hungry corporation has no clue how to design an installation for Linux.  I hope someone from Adobe reads this one days and learns that *nux packages can have DEPENDENCIES listed in the package and the system will attempt to download and install them during installation if they are missing from the local system.  This is one of the top reasons why I switched to *nix after being a Microsoft Partner.

Ok, so the first thing in getting an install that does not want to work is to find instructions from someone who has gotten it to work.  I value my time greatly, and do not believe in re-inventing the wheel (when not necessary).

next problem, Adobe Air requires the Gnome-keyring (boo…. bad, hisss…. yuk yuk yuk) or the KWallet (I don’t think they still make this app, it is now “The KDE Wallet” (filename is KDEWallet instead of KWallet) and can be found by going to System Settings –> Advanced –> KDE Wallet.  I went in and setup a default profile, very easy to do, just hunt around as there are only about 7 things to do in the control panel and if you have not done this already you will find a drop down field that is blank.   now I am getting an issue when attempting to install, or I would not have taken time to write this (unfortunately I had the issue yesterday and did my research for getting around it, then started up again today and as the first set of instructions did not work I am consequently writing this post.  so the bad news is I may not get the same error right now when I try again so I can copy it to this post… yeah… it is working right now… sorry about that, but the main part of the error was “Gnome-keyring or KWallet is necessary to install Adobe Air”  Thankfully (for all) this means a shorter post.  I did a bunch of things and not all of them worked.  Here are the 5 steps I followed so you can copy and paste, start out in a terminal window in the directory that you have downloaded the Adobe Air installer to (most likely ~/Downloads).

Step #2 is from the Adobe website (combined from several steps into one command, obviously the guys techs at Adobe are not Linux people), I had lots of error messages here (not found, already installed, conflicts with installed version, copies files already installed from installed package <name-o-package> and maybe one or two more).  I would bet a couple of $$$ that you can skip this line, but as I have already done it, I don’t know.  (the short version: you should be able just skip step 2)  The remaining instructions came from the website that is referenced from the first link in this post

1. cd ~/Downloads
2. sudo yum install lib32asound2 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32z1 libc6 libc6-i386 libnss3.so.1d libnssutil3.so.1d libsmime3.so.1d libssl3.so.1d libnspr4.so.0d libplc4.so.0d libplds4.so.0d ld-linux.so.2 gtk2-devel.i386 libxml2.i386 nss.i386 libXt.so.6 gnome-keyring.i386 xterm rpm-libs.i386
3. touch ~/.airinstall.log ~/.airappinstall.log
4. sudo chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
5. sudo yum install -y gtk2-devel.i686 nss.i686 nss-softokn.i686 libxml2-devel.i686 libxslt.i686 gnome-keyring.i686 rpm-devel.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 PackageKit-gtk-module.i686 libXt.i686 gtk2-engines.i686 libcanberra-gtk2.i686 xterm
6. sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

That did it for me, I clicked “install” “accept” “done” and that was a wrap.  now to test it…

oops… the directions on that blog post go on to say “On Fedora 12, you would not be able to install or run any AIR application. This is probably due to SELinux security policy with the certificate in Adobe AIR.”

The good news… there is a solution, the bad news, as displayed in the blog post it will not work due to a syntax error (tried in BASH, SH, KSH, and TCSH all gave the syntax error except TCSH which gave an illegal variable error)  lucky us the blogger posted the reference link for the solution and I went to check it out.  No help there it is letter for letter correct.  I am lucky I do have a small brain that can occasionally come up with solutions to technical based problems.  here is what I did and, yes it did work.

1. cd ~/Downloads (you can skip this if you are still there from my previous instructions above)
2. touch crypt
3. sudo chmod +x crypt
4. echo ‘for c in /etc/opt/Adobe/certificates/crypt/*.0; do aucm -n $(basename $c) -t true; done’ >crypt
5. sudo ./crypt

piece of cake! something I learned from an AIX training class I had last year, if it doesn’t work from a command line, then darn it, put it in a shell script file!!!

There are also instructions on that original blog post for installing and uninstalling Adobe Air Apps, the install part is pretty straight forward, go to the website that has the app, click install.  the uninstall instructions have a couple of steps.  when I get around to uninstalling something I’ll add them to this post (probably in the next 2 hours!!)