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!