Many older educational study materials do only support Windows. For example the German editor Hüber produced many of its language programs with Adobe AIR. Unfortunately Adobe abandoned AIR for Linux a long time ago. Since then there was no way to run Adobe AIR applications on Linux machines. The improvements in wine 1.8 together with some wine-tricks now allows Adobe AIR applications to run with wine. This note explains the setup.

Install Adobe AIR in wine

  1. Most of the following is inspired by this manual Manual.

    Important
    		 You need a recent version of wine. The one I tested and worked for me is: wine 1.8.3-3~bpo8+1 from the Debian backports repository. 
    sudo apt-get install wine winetricks
# test your wine installation
wine notepad
winetricks wininet

    The last command winetricks wininet did not work for me. “As a workaround, I downloaded the file from one of the other mirrors (http://www.filewatcher.com/m/W2KSP4_EN.EXE.135477136-0.html) and copied the .exe file into /home/USER/.cache/winetricks/win2ksp4, then run again the script and all went smoothly. URL.”

    winetricks wininet
    Important
    		 Update 8.9.2017: a reader reported that with version Wine 2.0 (and newer) the command winetricks wininet is not necessary at all and will lead to problems. So best first try without it.

    “I also like to disable to spurious FIXME messages that spew out of Wine by default (and typically just clutter useful logs and serious error messages):”

    export WINEDEBUG=fixme-all
echo 'export WINEDEBUG=fixme-all' >> ~/.bashrc

  2. Get Adobe Air https://get.adobe.com/air/otherversions/

    Choose:

    • Windows and

    • Adobe AIR 22.0 for Win32

      wine AdobeAIRInstaller.exe

Install AIR application in wine

  1. Install helper script to launch airappinstaller.exe [1]

    echo 'find ~/.wine -name "airappinstaller.exe" | head -n 1 | xargs -I % wine "%" `winepath -w $1`' | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/install_air_app

sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/install_air_app

  2. Install AIR application

    wine "/media/cdrom/Planetino 2 iKB Installer.exe"

Run AIR application

env WINEPREFIX="/home/<your home directory>/.wine" wine-stable C:\\Program\ Files\\Hueber\\Planetino\ 2\ iKB\\Planetino\ 2\ iKB.exe
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