Adobe recently announced the release of Adobe AIR 1.5 for Linux! For us Linux users this is huge! Now desktop RIAs with Adobe AIR work the same on Windows, Mac, and Linux! I recorded a short instructional video that shows how to get it working.
(Original video size is 1024 x 768 so you might want to <a href="/air_on_linux"target=”_blank” >open it in a new window or tab.)
Getting Flash Player working on 64-bit Linux systems has been a challenge. But not anymore! Today Adobe Systems released a beta of native Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux! Check it out and report bugs to the open Flash Player bug database. Here is a short video I shot of me testing the new Flash Player 10 plugin for 64-bit Ubuntu Linux. Let me know what you think!
Normal computer users like my father know at least three software vendors: Microsoft, Adobe, and Intuit. Microsoft is known for Windows and Office, Adobe for PDF (Reader / Acrobat), and Intuit for Quicken and QuickBooks. Yet all three of these software vendors are changing. All are moving in two directions concurrently: rich Internet applications and the cloud. These two paradigm shifts are changing how developers build software but more importantly they are changing how people like my father experience and use software.
Having used Linux as my primary desktop for over ten years I can’t help but be a bit jealous of all the great software Windows and Mac users have available to them. But I can’t really blame the software creators for focusing on only those platforms. It’s just purely economics. The cost / benefit of making software work on Linux just isn’t there for most consumer software. What we have always dreamed of is “Write Once, Run Anywhere”. Why can’t software developers write applications for one OS and have it run on all of them?
It appears the Flash Player engineering team is making progress on 64-bit Linux support. There are no details yet on when this will ship. But I’m sure they could still use your help.
I run 32-bit Linux but there is a very vocal group of people who really want 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player. Today there is a decent work around for running the 32-bit Flash Player on a 64-bit Linux system using the nspluginwrapper. From what I’ve heard it works fairly well on most distro’s but I haven’t heard yet how well it works with the new Flash Player 10 beta. Despite this potential work around eventually Adobe does need to natively support 64-bit Linux - and they will. This is not as simple as a recompile - otherwise there would be 64-bit support today. There is a bug already filed in the public Flash Player bug database for 64-bit support. I’d encourage you to not just go vote for that bug but also to get involved. As Tinic Uro points out in the bug comments, the missing piece for 64-bit support is open source - so you can help! Flash Player uses the open source Mozilla Tamarin VM. This VM does not yet support 64-bit Linux because all that machine code generation in the JIT compiler needs to be ported from 32-bit to 64-bit. The code is in Mozilla’s Tamarin Central Mercurial repo. This IS open source! You can help get 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player!
Tomorrow night I’ll be presenting at the New York GNU/Linux Meetup Group about Adobe Open Source - including the Adobe Flex SDK, Mozilla Tamarin, Adobe AIR (pieces like SQLite and WebKit), and BlazeDS. More details here. Hope to see you there!
Revolutions may be enabled by technology, but they are driven by people. Adobe’s recent announcements about Flex, Flash, and Adobe AIR on Linux are the most recent technology enablers for the software revolution that is currently underway.
Usually I’m one of the first to post about Adobe’s Linux related announcements. My trip to Bangalore, India, however, made me a little late to the party this time. In case you haven’t seen the announcements, on March 31, 2008 Adobe released an alpha version of Adobe AIR on Linux and an update to the alpha version of Flex Builder 3 for Linux (which supports building AIR applications on Linux). On the same day Adobe also announced that we joined the Linux Foundation.
Adobe recently released an alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux and a updated alpha 3 version of Flex Builder for Linux. I wanted to show everyone how easy it is to build and run desktop RIAs with Flex and Adobe AIR so I recorded a quick video. In the video I use Papervision3D and a component I created called “TurbulentApplication” to turn an ordinary AIR Application into an application which pitches and rolls in response to the accelerometer values on my Ubuntu laptop. While most AIR applications work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, this one only works on Linux because as far as I know Windows and Mac don’t have a way to read the accelerometer values from a file, like Linux. If you have Linux (and an accelerometer) and want to run the application you can download it here. If you want to download the source code for the TurbulentApplication component, you can get it here.
Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime for deliverying rich Internet applications on the desktop. Developers using Flex, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax can easily build applications for the desktop using Adobe AIR. As of today there have only been releases of Adobe AIR for Windows and Mac but Adobe is committed to also delivering a version for Linux. This is great news for developers like me who use Linux as their primary desktop operating system. The Adobe AIR team is now in the phase of development where they need a handful of additional testers to begin testing initial builds of AIR on Linux. If you are interested please answer the questions below in an email to helptesterairlinux at adobe dot com.