Getting Adobe AIR for Ubuntu 8.10 couldn’t be easier.  Visit the Adobe AIR download page and it’ll automatically detect your system type from your browser’s settings.  The file is a .bin file which means you don’t have to compile it.  Assuming you download it with firefox, simply fire up your terminal, change to your download directory (probably ~/Desktop) and issue

nuke@nuke-laptop:~/Desktop$ chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin 
nuke@nuke-laptop:~/Desktop$ sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Note: I was getting a very nondescript error when I ran that command saying that Adobe AIR couldn’t be installed and, of course, that was about all of the information I got.  I found out it was because I had the Adobe AIR 1.1 beta installed, which I needed to uninstall.  If you get that, simply run the following command (on Ubuntu):

nuke@nuke-laptop:~/Desktop$ sudo dpkg -r adobeair-enu

and you’ll be fine. If you’re still having problems,definitely look at Adobe’s short FAQ on AIR 1.5.  It will give you a few things to try.  I also had to uninstall my previous AIR stuff with the following commands:

nuke@nuke-laptop:~$ rm .appdata/ -rf
nuke@nuke-laptop:~$ rm .adobe/AIR/ -rf
nuke@nuke-laptop:~$ rm .macromedia/Flash_Player/www.macromedia.com/bin/air* -rf

Then, to get things working, I had to go to the Flash Player download site and download the newest version of Flash!  Also, for anything else that I had installed for AIR (such as twhirl) I had to go in and manually remove it from Ubuntu’s package system.  Now, with most AIR apps, they name the package $appname.air.123o1u4831414323 or somesuch.  However, with twhirl, it installs it as de.makesoft.twhirl.0ea062bc275e7ed1e6ec3762effd73c7158adf33.1 (at least for me) so I had to run

nuke@nuke-laptop:~$ sudo dpkg -r de.makesoft.twhirl.0ea062bc275e7ed1e6ec3762effd73c7158adf33.1

That let me reinstall twhirl. If you can’t find that exact app but have the same problem, try autocompleting (tab) in the terminal after you type “de.makesoft”.  After all of that work, it was working great.  Finally!

"Can't open /usr/share/mime-info/air.keys" (error 2: no such file or directory)"
"Can't open /usr/share/mime-info/air.mime" (error 2: no such file or directory)"

Obviously, this wasn’t the worst thing that could possibly happen to me… but it was rather aggravating!  To solve this problem I went scrounging through the depths of the interblags and finally managed to fix it.  Lots of help comes from the Dusty Pixels blog, but I figured I would compile what worked for me here.

I will copy in these codes directly as I used them (and supress any output).  Please note that I do sudo into root for this fix just to make sure there are no permissions errors–if you wish to go the fully ‘approved’ method, just append sudo on every single command here.

nuke@nuke-laptop:~$ cd /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils/

nuke@nuke-laptop:/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils$ sudo su

root@nuke-laptop:/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils# xdg-mime uninstall --novendor /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml

root@nuke-laptop:/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils# sudo nano ../support/AdobeAIR.xml

This step requires that you remove the three lines starting with <magic priority=”100″> and ending with </magic>.

root@nuke-laptop:/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils# xdg-mime install --novendor /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml

root@nuke-laptop:/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils# sudo unlink /usr/share/mime-info/air.keys

root@nuke-laptop:/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils# sudo unlink /usr/share/mime-info/air.mime

root@nuke-laptop:/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils# sudo ln -s /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/support/air.keys /usr/share/mime-info/air.keys

root@nuke-laptop:/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils# sudo ln -s /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/support/air.mime /usr/share/mime-info/air.mime

And there you go!  You shouldn’t have any more mime-type errors in Filezilla!