Getting Twhirl and Other Adobe AIR Apps Working on Ubuntu 64

There's been some pretty fun and interesting stuff coming out of the Adobe AIR platform. I've tinkered with building some stuff on the platform myself, but most of my use of AIR-related has been using the wide array of Twitter apps. That's probably the biggest category of AIR apps at the moment.

I've been using Twhirl pretty heavily and prefer it to the web interfaces. However, while Twhirl and AIR run on my Windows boxes and my Mac, my primary laptop/workstation runs Ubuntu, which isn't a first class citizen in the AIR world.

I like to have the same tools available on all of my workstations whenever possible. So, when an alpha for Linux was announced, I took note, planning to get it installed when I got a chance.

Just before I left for Ireland, I gave it a shot, downloading the .bin file, running it and getting about half way through the installer before the install dying. I looked up the error only to find that I was out of luck. While Adobe supports many Linux distributions, including the one I use, what it *doesn't* support is the 64 bit version that I'm running.

So, today at lunch, I went looking for a way to get it running, despite Adobe's lack of support. So many of the apps that claim not to work on 64 bit Linux actually work just fine if you do it right.

What I found on several sites all boiled down to the same answer/solution. There are some glitches that are kind of a pain (like Twhirl not saving my passwords), but I've got Twhirl running on Ubuntu 64. Here's how to do it.

First, rather than the regular AIR for Linux, download the AIR SDK at the bottom of this page. I extracted that archive to the following path:

/home/j/Software/AdobeAIRSDK

Second, get an app like Twhirl. You need to save the .air file somewhere. It, like so many things these days, is a ZIP file.

So, I unzipped it to the path:

/home/j/Software/twhirl

with the following command:

unzip /home/j/Downloads/twhirl-0.8.3.air

Then, you need to run a complicated commandline to actually launch the AIR app. That, of course, calls for a shell script.

So, I created the file:

/home/j/Software/twhirl/twhirl.sh

and put the following contents in it, all on one line:

/home/j/Software/AdobeAIRSDK/bin/adl -nodebug
/home/j/Software/twhirl/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /home/j/Software/twhirl

Then, to make that script executable, you have to run:

chmod +x /home/j/Software/twhirl/twhirl.sh

From there, you can either just run it from a command prompt or create a launcher up in the task bar. Right click and "Add to Panel". Choose "Custom Application Launcher".

In the "Name" box, put "Twhirl".

In the "Command" box, put "/home/j/Software/twhirl/twhirl.sh" (obviously adjust for your username).

If you want a different icon, click the springy icon in the top left and click OK when you're done.

Click your new launcher icon and you'll see the Twhirl app launch.

There you are. It's working. Sort of.

There's still problems and I expect that eventually, it will work the "normal" way. Until then, this will get the job done without having to boot up a virtual machine.