Installing AIR Apps On Linux

Jan 16, 2014 #Actionscript #Linux #AIR #Ubuntu

Adobe AIR isn't officially supported under Linux anymore, but it's easy enough to install AIR apps using Wine and a couple handy scripts. This post will walk you through installing Wine, AIR, and a couple test apps, SWFWire Inspector and Dragon Age Legends (simply because their .air packages are easily accessible.)

Note - if you're looking for instructions on installing the AIR SDK to setup an app development environment under Linux, see my other post. Here again, I'm using Ubuntu 12.04.3 64-bit, but these instructions will be similar for many Linux distros.

Install Wine and the Windows AIR Runtime

First, install Wine, winetricks, and wininet if you don't already have them:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.7 winetricks
winetricks wininet

I also like to disable to spurious FIXME messages that spew out of Wine by default (and typically just clutter useful logs and serious error messages):

export WINEDEBUG=fixme-all
echo 'export WINEDEBUG=fixme-all' >> ~/.bashrc

Now download and install the AIR Runtime installer for Windows:

cd ~/Downloads
wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/win/download/4.0/AdobeAIRInstaller.exe
wine AdobeAIRInstaller.exe

Go through the installer with all the default options.

Setup Install Script for AIR Apps

Installing AIR apps requires quite a bit of typing -- the airappinstaller.exe is buried in your ~/.wine folder, and it takes full paths in Windows format (i.e. Z:\Downloads\...), so I created a script to help install AIR apps. Run the following command to write the script in /usr/local/bin/install_air_app (note, it's a single long line, don't split it up):

echo 'find ~/.wine -name "airappinstaller.exe" | head -n 1 | xargs -I % wine "%" `winepath -w $1`' | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/install_air_app

And make it executable:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/install_air_app

Install AIR Apps

You're all setup, you can now install some AIR Apps. For testing, I installed a handy SWF debug tool called SWFWireInspector and a Facebook-game-turned-AIR-App, Dragon Age Legends:

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://github.com/downloads/magicalhobo/SWFWire/SWFWireInspector-2.21.air
install_air_app SWFWireInspector-2.21.air

cd ~/Downloads
wget http://dragonagelegends.com/DragonAgeLegends.air
install_air_app DragonAgeLegends.air

The installers create Desktop shortcuts by default (unless you uncheck the box), and those work just fine. If you don't create desktop shortcuts, you'll have to dig around for the installed .exe files and launch them like so:

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/SWFWire\ Inspector/SWFWire\ Inspector.exe

Running SWFWire Inspector and Dragon Age Legends AIR Apps in Ubuntu

Potential Problems

Since AIR apps have different requirements (GPU acceleration, sound, disk access, etc), it's possible you could run into problems running specific apps. I ran into a problem with sound that was resolved by installing some audio-related libraries (also as shown in my other post):

sudo apt-get install alsaplayer-daemon alsa-oss alsaplayer-xosd  pulseaudio-esound-compat oss-compat

If you get specific error messages, google around for solutions, especially at winehq.org, or let me know in the comments and we can try to resolve them. Happy AIR Apping, my Linux friends!