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
- cd ~/Downloads
- 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
- touch ~/.airinstall.log ~/.airappinstall.log
- sudo chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
- 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
- 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.
- cd ~/Downloads (you can skip this if you are still there from my previous instructions above)
- touch crypt
- sudo chmod +x crypt
- echo ‘for c in /etc/opt/Adobe/certificates/crypt/*.0; do aucm -n $(basename $c) -t true; done’ >crypt
- 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!!)
start off with some non-techie stuff first…
I head back to see my surgeon next Monday, where he will tell me that in another week or two I should start putting some weight on my leg (toe touch, or partial weight bearing?) when at my PT. I am also hoping he will tell me it is okay to get my incision wet, as it has been making it very difficult to take showers!
ok, on to the good stuff.
So, I am not at home and do not have my desktop machine available for use for the last week, I have been going through withdrawal… but having to work on someone else’s machine, and my wife’s laptop (I think I mentioned before, I gave her mine, and sold her old one) has taught me one important lesson, why I prefer Linux.
My number one reason for preferring Linux over Windows is system maintenance. What do I mean? well, I mean keeping everything up to date, this latest round of Adobe patching should make this make sense to everyone. I don’t use Acrobat on my Linux machines for this reason. However; back to the point, when I need to check for updates on my Linux machine I open Yakuake with a quick hit of F12 and type “sudo yum update” and it comes back and tells me every single thing installed on my system that has an update available, period, end of statement. On windows, I have to launch 5-8 different apps, find their “check for updates” button/link and wait for the results (I have learned by doing this that OpenOffice.org does not notify you of a new version being released, only if there are updates for your version. example, I have 3.1 installed, and 3.2 is now available. clicking the check for updates menu option tells my “There are no available updates for this version” (maybe not word for word, but that is just about what it says). I run windows update, Acrobat Update, Java update, Picasa update, Chrome update, Firefox update, and on and on… (yes I know there is an Adobe Updater, but I don’t know how to initiate it in Windows, and never cared enough to look it up, but now that I have mentioned it I sure I found instructions and have put a link to them here).
Simple and easy to manage, most distros even let you run their package manager and it has a button to click to check for updates for your system, making it easier and more time consuming all at once to do the same thing. (Yakuake is always running and it takes me about 1.5 seconds to type that line into the terminal, it takes a lot longer to load the package manager from the application menu and then click the check for updates button, but you don’t have to type that way!)
The actual GUI interface for Windows an Linux and even MAC are so similar these days, that I don’t care which I am using as far as that is concerned. I have come to the understanding that there will always be applications/games for an OS, other than the one I am using, that I want to use/play (take iPhone for example, they have the best Air Traffic Controller game I have played, and I’ve hunted those down and played quite a number of them, but I don’t own anything made by Apple, and probably won’t ever, unless the 2nd gen iPad totally rocks… but I will be getting an Android Tablet this year (possibly the Notion Ink Adam, or the HTC Google Chrome OS tablet), so I still probably won’t get an iPad). My concern at this point, as I spend more and more time as a Unix Admin is maintenance. The system I use at home needs to be practically maint free, as most Linux and Unix machines are, they will run for years without being touched by an admin, the best I know of are an AIX Server and a OpenVMS server, the AIX server has been running since 1991 and has never been patched, updated, reconfigured, or messed with in any way. It is setup to contact a NIM server for logins, so no new users have ever been added to it, it has never crashed, never lost power, never been rebooted. That to me is the greatest achievement of humankind (in technology anyways, and some of these companies need to take a look at the AIX OS and learn something from it!!!). The other machine, the OpenVMS machine has been running since before 1994, but has not been patched, never been upgraded, never been rebooted, since 1994. now I know next to nothing about OpenVMS, and have not personally logged into the machine itself, but a friend and co-worker of mine used to be the sole admin for the OpenVMS machines at that company and although that one is the only one like this, it is still running today without interference from humans. I am sure some other machines are out there doing the same, but these are two that I know. The longest Windows Server I have heard of running without rebooting or crashing was about 2.5 – 3 years, after which the hardware components in the server failed and the machine was replaced. Some people have told me about Windows servers being up for 4 years and then being restarted by some new guy, but I have no validation of it and they could not give me a more exact time frame.
not sure if I made a compelling argument or not, but I need some medication and to go prop my leg up, so I am done here. Also expecting UPS sooner or later for an over night supersave shipment… and it takes me 5 mins to get downstairs… :)
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