My friend Gordon needed help installing Adobe AIR and Twhirl on Ubuntu. I just installed it on my notebook running Kubuntu 8.04. These steps should work almost the same on Ubuntu. I don’t know of any changes in the 8.10 release that would make this any different. But I have not tried it.
- Download Adobe AIR from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air_linux.html
- Navigate to the folder you downloaded AIR to. In Kubuntu you can use Konqueror or Dolphin, in Ubuntu you would use Nautilus. Right click on the downloaded file and select Properties. Select the Permissions tab and select the little check box that says “Is executable”, or “Allow executing file as program”.
- Click the file to start the Adobe AIR install. It took a few seconds before the installation started on my machine, be patient.
- Step through the prompts to install AIR. You may need to give it your user password at some point.
- Download Twhirl from http://www.twhirl.org/ I clicked the “Download and install” link in the section that says “Manual Installation” instead of trying the automatic install.
- Click (or double click) the Twhirl application that you downloaded to start the installation.
- Install using all the default settings that AIR gives you.
- Configure as necessary.
It really was that simple. I did it last week on my desktop and installed it on my notebook as I was writing this.
There are optional ways to set the permissions and install using the command line. That is the way I did it on my desktop. But since I was trying to write this in a simplified manner, I used the GUI the whole time and it worked just fine.