AIR for Linux:Release Notes

Additional Requirments AIR for Linux uses, Firefox certificate store for SSL certificates. It is recommended that Firefox is installed and launched at least once on the system. If Firefox is not installed, when a Secure site is accessed, AIR will prompt for accepting SSL certificate once for each session.

Installing Adobe AIR

Please uninstall previous pre-release/labs alpha installations before proceeding. To uninstall previous labs release use command “rpm –e AdobeAIR_enu” OR “dpkg –r adobeair-enu” as the case may be.

Installation of AIR on Linux requires administrative privileges. You may invoke the installer as a normal user without administrative rights, and the installer would automatically elevate it to an administrative operation by asking for the admin password (root password for non-Debian systems and sudo user’s password for Debian systems)

The runtime gets installed in /opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0

Runtime Installation/Uninstallation Details

The runtime installer is a binary file named adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin.
You need to grant execution rights to the bin file.
- To grant execution rights, run the command "chmod +x adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin" in a terminal window.
It could be installed by just double-clicking the binary.
The runtime requires a running X server to install.
The installer would elevate itself, if required.
The runtime gets installed as a native package i.e rpm on a rpm based distribution and dpkg on a Debian. Currently AIR doesn’t support any other package format, so it may not install on distributions like Slackware etc.
The package names are adobeair1.0 and adobe-certs.
To uninstall the runtime, use the Uninstall AIR Runtime menu item in the programs/applications menu
AIR registers the mime-type: “application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip ” which means that .air files would be of this mime-type and they would be owned by AIR.

Application Installation / Uninstallation Details

Applications can be installed by double-clicking on a file with the .air extension.
The installer takes you through a wizard and would elevate itself if required (i.e. it would ask for an administrative password if you are a non-admin user).
It gets installed as a native package (rpm or dpkg).
Currently, the package name is a combination of the applicationID and publisherID for the application.

Tips and Tricks

To install an application, you may use the command “/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/airappinstaller <full path to the air file here>”. Currently relative paths do not work.
If double clicking on air file, after having installed the runtime, doesn’t launch the application installer (this happens on some older distributions like Red Hat WS 4 or NLD 9), you might have to log out and log back in.
To clean up the machine and try a fresh installation, you may rename the .adobe and .macromedia folder in the home directory for both root and the current user to any name.
To generate logs for runtime installation create empty file .airinstall.log (touch .airinstall.log) in user home directory. Please post this file while reporting issues in forum.
To generate logs for application installation create empty file .airappinstall.log (touch .airappinstall.log) in user home directory. Please post this file while reporting issues in forum.

Features Available

The following features are available with this release:

Runtime/Application Install/Update and Uninstall.
HTML Loader with JS support to render HTML within AIR applications.
Local Database APIs
File system support with support for user folders like Desktop/Documents etc.
Desktop Integration with Drag and drop, clipboard support
Windowing support with System chrome none/standard
Transparency
Menu support with context menu, menu bar, pop up menus and menu events.
Networking
Network change detection (Event.NETWORK_CHANGE )
System wide idle detection (userIdle Event)
NativeApplication APIs
Capabilities (OS) API
Mouse events
Detection of running application (InvokeEvent.INVOKE)
File type registration
System tray icon and menu support
Hardware acceleration
Menu keyboard accelerators
Screen API (multi-monitor support)
V4L2 camera support, A/V Hardware change API
Printing
Launch application at Startup
PDF and SWF within HTML
IME support
Fullscreen
Localization
Encrypted Local Store.
Certificate store.

Features Not Available

Known Issues for AIR on Linux

The following is a list of known issues with this release:

Runtime Installation

Some older distributions have issues with .bin in the filename. Simply remove the .bin from the installer file name and run the installer.
No package format other than rpm or dpkg is supported. Installation will not work on distributions that have a different package management mechanism.

Application Installation

The programMenuFolder entries in the AIR application descriptor are not honored in some older distributions.
If there are space characters in the text of the <name> tag in the AIR application descriptor, an entry in the System Applications menu is not created in some older distributions.
You must use an absolute path to the AIR file when installing an AIR application on the command line.
Installation progress bar goes to completion and then resets itself.
Special characters like single and double quotes are not supported in some application xml tags. This may cause an application to not install.
If there is a file/directory in application package with same name as “filename” tag in application-xml , then application doesn't install on Linux.
Entries made to start application on login, are not cleaned up on uninstallation.
App Installation hangs on 64 bit distributions if 32-bit version of libxslt.so.1 library is not present on the machine.
Badge/Seamless installation will require Flash Player 10 to work.

File System

file.exists property is returned as false for large file

File type registration

Application icon won't appear for some unknown extensions(e.g. abc, def etc.) on certain KDE distributions.
Any AIR application that has been set as default handler for known extensions(e.g. html, txt) will not remove it's icon and would continue to remain the default handler even after uninstalling the application.
The application will not register itself as secondary handler (It won't appear in the "Open With" context menu), for already registered extensions(e.g txt, html).

Drag and Drop / Clipboard

When using Primary X clipboard (selection buffer), selecting text from a text control inside an AIR application could overwrite data in secondary clipboard as well.

Windowing / Menu

Windowing actions (setting of bounds, maximize etc.) are always asynchronous.
There might be differences across distributions due to dependency on Window Manager.
Transparency requires a compositing Window Manager (e.g compiz, beryl, latest metacity)
Transparency won't work with virtualization softwares like VMWare.
Transparent windows do not allow mouse events to pass through.
Invisible windows become visible when maximized.
System tray icons are not transparent on KDE

Networking

Caching is not supported.
Using multiple methods of authentication (e.g. Basic, Digest) with the same server does not work.
LocalConnections between AIR apps and SWFs require Flash Player 10.

Encrypted Local Store

Local store data cannot be accessed when session is exported using SSH or when session is changed to another user using su.
Encrypted Local store uses Keyring(Gnome) or KWallet(KDE). System may prompt for a password for accessing ELS data.
Application name is reported as "anonymous" in the KWallet password dialog.

Adobe AIR SDK

Installation

The SDK is available in tbz2 format.
Simply give the command: tar –jxvf <path to AIR-SDK.tbz2>

Known issues with ADT

ADT doesn’t work with GNU Java, which comes as a standard with many Linux distributions. To get it working, ensure that you have Sun Java in your path. Try the command java –version in the terminal to figure out which flavor of Java is being used.
Minimum required version of Sun Java/JRE is 1.4.2.
This build does not work with Flex builder. Use the command line options to package AIR applications.

Adobe Unix CertificateStore Manager (aucm):

The Command line tool (aucm) is used to manage the certificate store. Besides the standard functionality of adding a certificate, listing all the certificates, exporting a certificate, etc. it would have the following options:

Usage:

 aucm [OPTION...] - Adobe Unix Certificate-Store Manager

Help Options:

 -?, --help                                      Show help options

Application Options:

 -l, --list                                      List all the certificates in the store
 -a, --add                                       Add certificate to the store
 -d, --delete                                    Delete Certificate from the store
 -p, --print                                     Print the certificate
 -f, --certFile=cert.pem/cert.der                Add certificate to the store
 -n, --certName                                  Name of the certificate to perform the operation on
 -A, --trustAnchor=true/false                    Marks the certificate trustAnchor
 -t, --trusted=true/false/default                Marks the certificate is trusted or un-trusted
 -c, --trustCodeSigning=true/false/default       Set Code Signing Trust of the certificate

Sample Usage:

 To delete a certificate from the cert store
   aucm -n <certificate Name> -d 
 To add a certificate to the store
   aucm -f <Path of the certificate> -a 
 To specify whether a given certificate will be used as a trust anchor or not
   aucm -A true/false/default -n <certificate Name> 
 To specify whether a certificate is trusted or not (default is trusted, if the option is not specified)
   aucm -t true/false/default -n <certificate Name> 
 To specify if the certificate will be trusted for code-signing or not (if this option is never used, certificate defaults will be used)
   aucm -c true/false/default -n <certificate Name>

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