Adobe AIR 2.6 and Debian Sid 64-bit

I wanted to get Adobe AIR to work on my 64-bit Debian Sid installation, to try out some other twitter clients, more specifically Saezuri. (On a side note: the offering of twitter clients on linux is … mediocre. Bad, even. The (imho) best one is Pino, but it has problems of it’s own).

(Sidenote: Adobe has decided to discontinue AIR for Linux.)

It didn’t really go all that smooth, so here’s the process:

First, download the Adobe AIR 2.6 runtime from http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/853/cpsid_85304.html. Save it somewhere (like /tmp).
Next, open a terminal and make it executable: chmod +x /tmp/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Normally, now, you can try to install it: /tmp/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin. This should popup a dialog, telling you it’s going to install it. Unfortunatly at this point, I ran into a problem: it didn’t find either Gnome Keyring or KDE Kwallet, even though I have both installed on my system. After some digging, I recalled that AIR is a 32-bit framework, so I would need the 32-bit libraries for it to work.
While leaving the installer open, I went to look for the extracted directory, which was found under /tmp/air.w9qZiT, where, in one of the subdirectories I found a bunch of binaries which ended looking for libraries like libkwallet.so.1.
I found the needed libraries in the i386 packages kdelibs4c2a and libqt3-mt (which are for Debian Squeeze…), extracted them and put them in /usr/lib32:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      16 Aug  8  2010 libDCOP.so.4 -> libDCOP.so.4.2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  213988 Aug  8  2010 libDCOP.so.4.2.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      19 Aug  8  2010 libkdecore.so.4 -> libkdecore.so.4.2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2465476 Aug  8  2010 libkdecore.so.4.2.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      17 Aug  8  2010 libkdefx.so.4 -> libkdefx.so.4.2.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  172488 Aug  8  2010 libkdefx.so.4.2.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      25 Aug  8  2010 libkwalletclient.so.1 -> libkwalletclient.so.1.0.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   61452 Aug  8  2010 libkwalletclient.so.1.0.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      17 Sep  5  2010 libqt-mt.so.3 -> libqt-mt.so.3.3.8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      17 Sep  5  2010 libqt-mt.so.3.3 -> libqt-mt.so.3.3.8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7515480 Sep  5  2010 libqt-mt.so.3.3.8

Retry the installer, still didn’t go further. After some more digging, I found an article detailing the use of AIR on non-KDE and non-Gnome systems on the Adobe Knowledge base. (I use a mix of Gnome, GTK and KDE apps, with XFCE as desktop environment)

What I had to do was run the following commands before launching the installer:

export KDE_FULL_SESSION=1
export KDE_SESSION_VERSION=4

(for Gnome, see the article)

After this, the installer went ahead and dumped AIR in /opt/Adobe AIR. (spaces in a directory? Really, Adobe????)

Next hurdle: after installing Saezuri, I noticed it had a hideous black border:

… completely not acceptable. Luckely, this was easily fixed by enabling display compositing in the XFCE settings. Another problem fixed:

The last problem I ran into is that AIR seems to default to firefox as the default browser. Since I’m not a firefox user (I do have it installed for those special occasions), that didn’t do. After some more digging I found a blog post detailing how to change this: apparently Adobe decided that hardcoding firefox as a browser was a good idea. I fixed this by hex-editing the libCore.so file under /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0, changing the hardcoded ‘firefox’ by ‘browser’, and adding a symlink under /usr/bin pointing browser to x-www-browser:
ln -s /usr/bin/x-www-browser /usr/bin/browser
(x-www-browser is part of the Debian alternatives system, which allows for easy selection of default browsers and what not.)

Now AIR seems to behave the way I want it to, so I’m a happy camper :)