Installing Adobe Air Apps (like Balsamiq Mockups) on Slackware64 13.37

Installing Adobe Air apps on Slackware64 13.37 is not painful if you know how to do it.

Start with a standard multilib setup.

First, remove Seamonkey and install GConf and ORBit2 from extra/google-chrome. Then install mozilla-nss and gnome-keyring from SlackBuilds.org. Taking dependencies into account, you get the following list of packages to build and install in order:

mozilla-nss
libtasn1
libgnome-keyring
gnome-keyring


Just paste the list into an sbopkg queue. You know the rest.

Set up a Slackware32 virtual machine the same way. Use it to build the exact same queue of packages. Copy them to your Slackware64 installation and use convertpkg-compat32 to build 32-bit compatibility versions of them. Install them.

Then download the Adobe Adobe Air 2.6 SDK for Linux and untar it anywhere you want.

Adobe Air apps are distributed as .air files, which are zips. When you have one that you want to run, first uncompress it. Then run it as follows:

/home/dugan/software/air/bin/adl -nodebug /home/dugan/software/MockupsForDesktop/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /home/dugan/software/MockupsForDesktop/

It’s a long command-line, so paste it into a shell script.

Note: while an Adobe Air runtime for Linux exists, I’ve concluded that it’s impossible to get it working in Slackware64.

Also, this post was heavily inspired by rpredica’s post on the same.