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.

Recently, many larger OEM system builders have started offering a selection of their models with Linux distributions pre-installed. Really big names such as Dell and Lenovo have offered this service.

Unfortunately, DesktopLinux.com reports that Lenovo have pulled out and will no longer offer Linux pre-installs on any of their home-oriented systems.

Lenovo does offer four high-end ThinkStation workstation models without any commercial operating system software, but all of its other systems now carry the "Microsoft Tax," it appears. That is, in order to purchase one of the systems, you have to pay for a Microsoft Windows operating system license.

Lenovo's executive director of external communications, Ray Gorman, denied in vague terms that the current situation marks a strategic shift, though he did admit the company is "refining its Linux strategy." He added, "Lenovo is not abandoning its commitment to choice of operating system, and actually is increasing the role of the Linux operating system in Lenovo's product portfolio."

What they will continue with, however, is offering Linux on a new line of 'netbooks', subcompact notebooks similar to the ubiquitous ASUS Eee PC.

This new netbook form factor will clearly be an important vector for desktop Linux to get to the masses, but this does potentially mean that other manufacturers will follow suit; dropping desktop Linux on traditional desktop and notebook systems to focus on netbooks.

Is it necessary to be pushing desktop Linux to 'real' machines with traditional desktop distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora and the like? Or should we just be glad as a community that the netbook phenomenon will get Linux greater exposure, even if it is only for more cut-down and lightweight systems?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

[via Linux.com, Google Alerts] [image source]