This weekend, I installed Fedora 12 (Constantine) on my laptop, and I have to say that so far, I’m impressed. Thanks to the standard GNOME desktop, it looked familiar, and felt like a more polished version of the Debian desktop that I’m used to. The installation only took 15 minutes, and almost everything worked immediately.
One of the only things that I’ve had troubles with thus far is Adobe AIR. Now normally, I avoid Adobe apps like they’re the plague, since the great ones are really expensive (Photoshop, Premiere, etc), and the free ones are awful and full of security holes (Reader, Flash on anything but Windows). In this case however, I got hooked on the AIR framework because of Tweetdeck, an excellent little application that makes managing Twitter feeds a dream.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work worth a shit on Fedora 12.
Now most AIR apps ship with an installer that will put the framework on your system if you don’t already have it. I’ve always had problems with this method on Linux, and have instead downloaded AIR directly from Adobe as a *.bin file, and installed it manually from a root terminal.
The next step is to install the app. In the case of Tweetdeck, the process is a little bit convoluted because they use a Flash widget on their website (Christ, why?) that starts the installation for you – sketchy from a security standpoint, but it’s always worked well for me in the past. Under Fedora, the installer just crashed.
Hoping for a workaround, I downloaded the *.air installer file to my desktop and tried to use the Adobe AIR Application Installer from my root terminal to do the job. All that got me was a bunch of angry error text. After a quick IxQuicking, I found this blog post with some answers in the comments:
#delete the AIR certs:
rm -rf /etc/opt/Adobe/certificates/crypt/#install your application like this:
su – /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/airappinstaller /path/to/install/file.air
While this worked, and the install actually completed (albeit with a bunch of angry error messages yelling at me for deleting the AIR security certs), Tweetdeck failed to function on launch first launch, complaining about Adobe AIR failing, and requesting that I file a bug.
Luckily, one quick restart later, and everything worked perfectly.
So long story short, AIR is kinda dirty on Fedora, and doesn’t work as well as on other distributions. Everything else, however, works great.
Forgot to mention this site, which gives an in-depth discussion of how to get AIR installed on systems that are being a pain:
http://investech.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/installing-adobe-air-on-fedora-12/
Why didn’t you just try the suggested way first? Perhaps it does actually work on Fedora, thus saving you all of the extra time and effort.