AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a cross-platform runtime environment for building web-based applications that can be deployed as desktop apps. AIR for Linux is currently in the alpha stages, so it’s got a ways to go before it’s officially released. I’ve been using it a little, and posted about it in my Twitter post a couple days ago. Here are the steps for getting AIR set up in Linux.

Open a terminal and do the following commands:

cd ~/Desktop
 
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
 
chmod +x adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
 
sudo ./adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

That should kick off the installer. Follow the steps through that (just a few) and AIR will be installed to “/opt/Adobe Air”. Not sure why they put spaces in the path, but OK. I’m also not sure how to change the installation path, as I’d like to have it installed to /air/ so it’s all in one spot separate from apps I compiled from source code, but I’m just nitpicky.

The next thing you’ll need to do is download some AIR apps. Here’s a list of AIR apps: http://airapps.pbwiki.com/. After you click through and find an app you like, download it and save it to the disk.

To install your new AIR app, simply execute the following:

/opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/airappinstaller /path/to/air/app

Follow the instructions on the installation, which by default goes to /opt, but you can actually change the location there. In Ubuntu, the start menu icon goes to Other, but I moved mine into a new folder called AIR. That should do it, you’ve just installed your first AIR app on Linux.