How to fix Adobe AIR’s installation on Ubuntu 9.04

Posted on August 16th, 2009 at 23:24, in .com, How To, Linux, Ubuntu.

I just want to start this article by emphasizing that I am not a fan of Adobe’s new products like Adobe AIR or Flex. They eat two buckets of RAM for some shiny effects that really don’t deserve this kind of resources. The explanation is rather simple: being new products, they are still full of bugs or their features aren’t quite implemented in the most intelligent possible way. Maybe after they mature a bit I will change my opinion.

Since I am on Twitter, I decided to use a client for updating my twits very easy and the best client for me proved to be TweetDeck, which is available for both Linux and iPod Touch (iPhone too). TweetDeck runs, unfortunately, on Adobe AIR. Trying to clean my system today of orphaned packages, somehow I have succeeded in messing Adobe AIR. No problem, let’s reinstall it. Only that the f*cker constantly failed serving me the lamest excuse ever (for running on Linux).

An error occurred while installing Adobe AIR. Installation may not be allowed by your administrator. Please contact your administrator.

I have tried to remove all the packages that belong to Adobe AIR (adobeair1.0 and adobe-certs) and then to reinstall but all of this with no luck. Until I have found these lines on a site that I forgot:

rm -rf ~/.adobe
sudo rm -rf /root/.adobe/ /root/.macromedia/ /root/.appdata/ ~/.macromedia/ ~/.appdata
sudo rm -rf /var/opt/Adobe\ AIR/
sudo rm -rf /etc/opt/Adobe/
sudo dpkg -P $(dpkg -l | grep adobeair | awk -F" " '{print $2}')
sudo dpkg -P $(dpkg -l | grep adobe-cert | awk -F" " '{print $2}')

Afterwards the installer worked okay. Be careful not to have your browser opened when performing the install. In some cases it apparently generated the same error regarding AIR.

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8 Comments

Tudor said

on August 17th, 2009,

at 17:14 hours

Why do you install it in the /root instead of ~/radu ?

Radu said

on August 17th, 2009,

at 17:45 hours

I am not installing it there. The place is /opt/Adobe. Though it seems that the installation process automatically puts some files there as it requires sudo privileges.

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TheGreenManalishi said

on August 26th, 2009,

at 14:09 hours

Your solution worked perfectly for me, thanks a bunch!

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Martin said

on September 6th, 2009,

at 16:17 hours

Thanks!!! The fix worked!

To bad Adobe didn’t figure this out when they wrote the installer. It should have done a better job of cleaning its own mess up, or throw a more detailed error message that points to a similar solution on their website.

Radu said

on September 6th, 2009,

at 16:34 hours

The funniest part is the one where you are asked to contact your administrator in a Linux environment…

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Sethster said

on September 7th, 2009,

at 00:30 hours

Thanks . This fix worked for me as well.

ubutnux said

on September 10th, 2009,

at 08:06 hours

it works perfectly. very nice info

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uberVU - social comments said

on November 7th, 2009,

at 05:06 hours

Social comments and analytics for this post…

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