Adobe Air on Slackware 14.2 32-bit
 

The Polish finance ministry publishes an application for sending tax declarations over the Internet (called "e-Deklaracje Desktop"). It's supposed to work on Windows, Mac and Linux. It requires Adobe Air and Adobe Reader.

I downloaded from get.adobe.com/air the last version of Adobe Air that was released for Linux, but the graphical installer failed with an error:

The rpm tool is present in Slackware, but Adobe Air uses commands such as "rpm -q rpm" which fail on Slackware (and on any OS that uses something other than rpm or dpkg to install most packages in the system). Adobe Air is not open source and the installer code is in a 20MB binary .so file, but using strace one can find out what commands it runs on the system.

I had to create a simple wrapper so that Adobe Air can use rpm on Slackware.

/usr/bin/airwrap:
/usr/lib/airwrap/rpm/rpm:
It can be used like this:

# airwrap ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
# airwrap "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/Adobe AIR Application Installer"

The first command starts the installation of the Adobe Air environment (you can download the installer from the Adobe website). The second command starts the installation of an application from an .air file.

Here are some screenshots in my local language from the installation and running of Adobe Air and an Air application on Slackware 14.2 32-bit:

https://i.imgur.com/2RSZALH.png

https://i.imgur.com/E0MGMQI.png

https://i.imgur.com/VM00p7I.png

https://i.imgur.com/xtpJakd.png

A Slackware package, airwrap.txz, can be downloaded from dropbox here: airwrap.txz.

Searching this forum I haven't found anyone using a similar method to run Adobe Air on Slackware, so perhaps this post will be useful. The same method could also work on other distributions such as Arch with a little modification.

:thumbsup:

Good job! Thanks for posting.

I just use WINE.

Dugan's solution is probably best because you will get a more recent version of Air. Failing that, I still don't think installing an rpm on Slackware directly is a good idea and can be avoided. Just extract the contents of the archive instead.

Switch to an empty working directory and fetch the binary.

The .bin actually has a .tar.lzma archive inside it. You just need to find it. Grep can help you do that e.g. (assuming bash)

Add 1 to this value (e.g. 6705). The contents of the internal, compressed tar can be extracted like so:

You can move the files under the build directory into place or create a .SlackBuild to automate all of this and allow you to easily uninstall at a later date.

It is the same shit as with reader, e.g. I wrote this 3 years ago

https://gist.github.com/ruario/42c6d49147863d5dfe78

[EDIT]: I see the Slackbuild for Reader still uses the tar.bz2, even though the bin is 13.5 Mb smaller. That is a lot of wasted bandwidth by all the people who have used this SlackBuild over the years. Oh well, I tried…

Adobe Air doesn't work the same way as Adobe Reader. It requires either rpm or dpkg to install .air applications on the system. So if you extract and install the files using your method, you won't be able to run "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/Adobe AIR Application Installer" because it fails to detect either rpm or dpkg (possibly you can use "airwrap" from the first post to run it but I haven't tested with this kind of installation).

As for Wine I associate it with glitches and problems in various applications so I wouldn't be happy using it (or recommending it) for a tax declarations app for example (which works fine on supported Linux distributions).

Then I would suggest you look at tweaking your “airwrap” with a system that does not call the real rpm but rather a similarly named shell script that extracts, converts and installs them with native tools. You don't want to be installing rpms if you can avoid it. AFAIK rpm is provided to allow you to query rpm meta-data and assist with repacking. You are not supposed to use it to install anything but of course it is your system and your choice.

P.S. Please don't take my criticism the wrong way. Your idea and method is clever, I just think that avoiding rpm altogether should be the end goal.

All criticism is fine. What you're suggesting is more ambitious but requires more work. It's possible that calls to "rpm -q <app_name>" and "rpm -e <app_name>" (if made by Adobe Air) would need to be handled specially, if Air applications are not managed by rpm on the system. Also updating an Air application to a new version would need to be tested.

If rpm in Slackware is only meant for querying package files then why does the rpm description in Slackware even suggest using --force and --nodeps options :)

In reading the description it is clear that Pat was recommending looking at the binary file first! He then goes on further to recommend that a proper Slackware package be created. There are many recent threads on this forum about using rpm2tgz and the errors it will create and the successes, you should review them. Since I have used rpm and rpm2tgz to install Brave and originally Palemoon, I'm very familiar with these tools and find I totally agree with ruario, don't use them if you want a working Slackware system.

Sometimes programs come with their own installers/updaters and using them is the only easy way. Sometimes it's similar but the programs rely on rpm or dpkg instead. Using these tools has this advantage over custom installers that you can see the list of installed files and the installation scripts.

I agree with the Slackware advice to check the files and scripts when installing an rpm. In the case of Adobe Air and Air applications all files are installed under /opt/<dir>. The installation scripts mainly create application menu shortcuts, desktop sbortcuts and update the MIME type and file extension database.

I don't believe that using rpm or rpm2tgz safely will make a Slackware system broken.

And you're right... Otherwise these tools would not be provided by the maintainers.

I've used rpm2tgz many times without issue.

Hello playker,

Another Slackware user from Poland here. It's funny but as soon as I have read the subject I already knew what problem it's going to describe. I've also been using e-deklaracje app for a few years but I had a different method for starting it on Slackware. I tried it now again and it still seems to work well. I first download 'Adobe AIR 2.6 SDK Linux (35.8 MB)' from https://helpx.adobe.com/air/kb/archi...k-version.html, unzip e-deklaracjedesktop.air to ../app/ext directory and run it like that:
Application starts, I didn't try to submit the tax declaration though. I remember that a couple of years ago I asked people on #slackware for help and someone was so kind that he even provided a tarball with some binaries. It was the very first time I realized that free open source software can have better support than commercial software.

Anyway, I don't use e-deklaracje anymore these days as they started to provide pre-filled reports and you only need a web browser to access them. It was a bad idea to use Adobe Air in the first place, Adobe stopped supporting Linux in 2011.

Instead of modifying one's real system one could consider using a throw-away virtual machine for that kind of 'tests'. I definitely would.

Which is exactly what dugan suggested and I agree with.

Yes, it is another method which could be used, I've seen something similar when looking at past threads about Adobe Air. I can understand why some people will prefer this method, but it's hard to tell if Air applications will always work correctly when started this way (using the SDK instead of the runtime and using "adl").

In my case for example I need to declare extra income in the PIT-36 form, it's not covered by the pre-filled reports.

I can sort of understand why they chose Adobe Reader for the interactive forms and why Adobe Air to integrate with Reader but as you say it's not a good idea if they want to support Linux.