FOSSwire

Peter walks you through the process of installing the new Adobe AIR beta, installing AIR apps and how to uninstall everything too.

NOTE: Adobe AIR isn't an open source product, but I think it's worthy of covering anyway due to its potential for bringing greater application compatibility to open source platforms.

Building applications that work across multiple platforms is always a challenge, but the web has provided a solution for some of those problems, by inherently being a cross-platform medium.

Sometimes the web isn't powerful enough, however, and there is no replacement for a desktop application.

Adobe's AIR platform is designed to bring the ease of development and cross platform support of the web and combine it with the benefits of desktop applications.

AIR is a framework for Windows, Mac OS X and now Linux that allows you to build lightweight desktop applications. It is worth mentioning that AIR isn't open source, and is obviously designed in part to push Adobe's platforms, such as Flash, which also aren't free and can be troublesome on Linux and Unix systems.

Ignoring that, Adobe AIR for Linux 1.1 Beta was released a few days ago and allows you to run pretty much any AIR application already written on your Linux system.

Unfortunately, the installation is a little cumbersome and could be a stumbling block unless you know how to use the command line.

The installation does work, however, and AIR applications then seem to run pretty well (I tried Twitter client TweetDeck and it appears to work just as it does on Windows and Mac OS X).

In my book, anything that opens up the Linux platform to more application support can only be a good thing, and despite AIR not being free software itself (it is free of charge, but doesn't meet the FSF definition of free software), I think this is a positive step and definitely worth it if you're already a user of AIR apps on other platforms.

You may want to take a look at the release notes and then download the beta.

Historically, installing Flash Player, and therefore getting access to much of the internet's video content, on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions has been a right pain.

You can download the archive from Adobe and run through the text-based installer, but Ubuntu Hardy Heron actually makes it a whole lot easier than previous releases (if you're using Firefox at least).

Here's how.

Launch Firefox 3 Beta 5, and browse to any site where you know that Flash is used (YouTube is a good one, but you need to be on an actual video page, not just the home page).

Click the Install Missing Plugins button, and in the next window, select the top option for the Adobe Flash Player installer.

There will be a couple of confirmation dialogues you will need to accept, including enabling the multiverse software repository for non-open source software.

The installer then downloads the package and gets installing. The installation process might appear to sit there for a while doing nothing, but really that is just the Flash Player installer doing its stuff behind the scenes, just not feeding its progress back to you.

Once that is done, however, you click Finish, the page reloads and the Flash Player works!

It really is a great improvement to the old installation method, and makes getting Flash up and running on your new Ubuntu system pretty painless!